Newsletter | Spring 2020

Greetings, RILE Community!

It is hard to believe that we are already moving toward the close of yet another academic school year. This has been a year to remember. But, despite all of the challenges we have been faced with, there have also been many successes. This review newsletter will offer you an opportunity to look back with joy and pride, and to look forward with hope and anticipation. This year, the GSE’s cross-area committee on Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) served as a site for sharing and interrogating scholarly activity that focuses on issues related to poverty, race, language, and inequality in education. 

The articles contained in this newsletter report on dynamic RILE Series speakers who talked to hundreds of scholars, educators, practitioners, and students concerning issues facing schools and communities and dynamic forces that significantly impacted their success. Below, you will also find an article on our 4th Annual RILE 2-Day Conference that took place in October 2019. The conference provided an intellectual space for faculty, students and our community friends to engage with critical scholarship about issues that exist at the intersection of race, language, literacy, and ethnicity broadly defined. They engaged intellectually with the social, psychological and cultural factors that impact economic disparities and shape teaching and learning in our ever changing society.

As the school year unfolded, the community of scholars who make up RILE demonstrated its ability to adapt to the changing world of education. We transitioned many of our gatherings to an online platform. Our ability to adapt to the real world conditions made it possible for us to continue working together toward contributing scholarly insights on concerns about COVID-19. A small subset of the RILE scholars who are contributing to the COVID-19 conversation are featured in this newsletter, while many of our other faculty and students are already thinking seriously about and responding to the ways that COVID-19 is impacting the world of education. These scholars represent some of the ambitious, collaborative research efforts that RILE brings to the interdisciplinary conversations that influence educational attainment for underserved learners. Finally, this newsletter also reports on some of the RILE graduates who are centering their scholarship on critically important, timely issues. They are becoming the next generation of scholars who will provide leadership in advancing knowledge and practice on RILE-related issues in education. The work of our RILE students is helping us to prepare and move forward toward rebuilding and reimagining what education can look like after COVID-19. As we think on these things, we invite you, our readers, to pause and take a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and where we need to go from here as a scholarly community.

As this newsletter goes to press, we would like to wish you peace, safety, and good health. It is our sincere hope that, despite all of the international turmoil, this message will find you doing well. RILE organizers are already considering innovative plans for our next annual Research Conference and Speaker Series that will highlight interdisciplinary scholarship and diverse voices within the academy that are sometimes overlooked or denied access in prominent spaces. RILE will seek to provide a forum where new voices can be heard.  We invite you to plan to join us in this endeavor.  RILE’s success depends on collaborative knowledge-building with scholars like you--who truly care about improving the lives of all learners.

Thank you & all the very best,

Arnetha F. Ball, Ph.D.

Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education (Emerita)

Chair, Race, Inequality, and Language in Education Program (RILE)

In this talk, Baker-Bell will discuss the history of Black Language education, share counter-stories from Black students about how they navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts, and she will introduce a new way forward through anti-racist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. This presentation will reflect ideas from Baker-Bell’s forthcoming book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, which will be published in May 2020 with Routledge.  

Dr. April Baker-Bell is an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education in the Department of English and African American and African Studies Department at Michigan State University. Her research interrogates the intersections of sociolinguistics, anti-black racism, and anti-racist pedagogies. As a transdisciplinary teacher-scholar-activist, Baker-Bell’s research draws from and makes contributions to the fields of English Education, Rhetoric & Composition, Literacy Studies, and Racio-linguistics. Baker-Bell is the recipient of many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the 2018 AERA Language and Social Processes Early Career Scholar Award, the Literacy Research Association’s STAR fellowship, and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color fellowship. Dr. Baker-Bell’s research has been published in the English Education journal, the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR), the Journal of International Review of Qualitative Research, and Theory into Practice. In addition to her language research, Baker-Bell’s scholarly interests include: anti-racist writing pedagogies, critical media literacies, Black feminist-womanist storytelling, and academic mentoring, with an emphasis on early career women of color and graduate students.

The 4th annual Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) Conference jumpstarted an exciting weekend of intellectual exchange and fellowship. Focused on the common goal of sharing research and theory seated at the intersection of issues related to race, inequality, and language, the 2019 RILE Conference proved to be an electrifying space for solutions-based intellectualism. Serving as a call to action, the conference speakers sought to move the field of education away from single-issue discussions about inequity and towards having our scholarship effect generative change. Held from Friday, October 18th to Saturday, October 19th, 2019, the RILE conference was a one of a kind forum for teachers, graduate students, researchers, community partners, and friends of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education to begin engaging with the power of generative and transformative praxis.    

Over 360 individuals gathered from far and wide to attend the two-day free conference centered on exploring interdisciplinary research’s role in developing scholarship, engaging transformative praxis, and evoking generative change. Attendees engaged with powerful keynote and featured speakers, as well as with over 30 graduate student posters. The 2019 program included a long list of distinguished scholars from Stanford and other universities from across the country, such as UC Santa Barbara, University of Georgia, University of Pittsburgh, UCLA, Humboldt State University, UNLV, and others. The conference was opened by Dr. Leigh Patel who invited us to labor toward decolonizing educational research and was followed by two additional impassioned keynotes, delivered by Dr. Tyrone Howard and Dr. Bettina Love, that explored worlds where race-based school induced trauma is eradicated. The weekend was closed by a riveting call to action for research that’s needed to move us all forward by a group of Stanford professors

The RILE Conference is just one way that Stanford’s GSE is taking a leading role in conducting research on issues of poverty, race, inequality, and language in schools and communities. The RILE program at Stanford is positioned to become a leader in this area by continuing to bring together leading scholars, emerging scholars, and interested stakeholders from across the nation. Thank you to all who attended, contributed, and/or participated in this year’s conference. We look forward to continuing to work in collaboration as we work together across disciplinary lines to improve the opportunities and means for all learners. 

Mark your calendars and join us for

the 5th Annual RILE Conference to be

held October 19th-23rd, 2020!

April 29th, 2020
 

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, highly esteemed associate professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, graciously agreed to be part of our ongoing RILE Speaker Series of 2019-2020 via Zoom. After her in-person visit was cancelled due to the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, we were fortunate that Dr. Sealey-Ruiz decided to postpone instead and present at a later date. In an overflowing Zoom room, she began by informing the audience that her work is part of a continuum of the legacies of Black literary writers. The work of this larger legacy surrounds her push for bridging disciplinary fields and bringing racial literacy to education and teacher education in particular. With conviction, Dr. Sealey-Ruiz shared that it is our duty to acknowledge and grapple with the racial illiteracy/literacy that exists in our lives. While this acknowledgement and grappling is important for adults to do, she stated that it is with young children, our babies, that this becomes more consequential. Racial literacy/illiteracy is not bounded by one’s age, and is important for us to nurture our young children in a way that avoids the production of future generations of racially illiterate people who continue to enact racism. Part of the task in building our racial literacy is to engage in her model of critical self-reflection - embodied in what she calls ‘the archeology of the self.’ Working with pre- and in-service teachers has pushed the development of this ‘archeology of the self’ framework that requires deep introspection, which teachers should first be required to do before expecting their students to do the same. Dr. Sealey-Ruiz concluded with a rousing reminder that this process of developing our racial literacy and engaging in this dig with the archaeology of the self is deeply connected to love, intimacy, and healing that is necessary for our communities’ strife towards (racial) justice in the world.