Tasha Austin PhD is the incoming assistant professor of teacher education, languages education and multilingualism for the University at Buffalo, Graduate School of Education. She is the outgoing Teacher Education Special Interest Group Representative for NJTESOL-NJBE where she co-created and hosted their “Critical Conversations” YouTube series. She hails from Jersey City, New Jersey and credits her richly diverse hometown for her interest in language and power. Tasha draws purpose, strength and direction from her ancestors, community and family who she joins in expecting love, critical truth-telling and care from her research and praxis. Her research uses critical race theory and Black feminist epistemologies through a raciolinguistic perspective to qualitatively examine language, identity and power, and the ways in which antiBlackness emerges in language education and (language) teacher preparation. Her dissertation work entitled, “Race, Language and Ideology in an Urban Teacher Preparation Program” calls for a reckoning with antiBlackness as reflected in the language and languaging expectations of U.S. educational policy, and teacher education curricula and instruction. Her work has been published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, the Journal for Multicultural Education, the International Journal of Literacy, Culture and Language Education among others.

Mentor: April Baker-Bell, Michigan State University, East Lansing

Jordan Bell is an award-winning Black Studies, English, and Philosophy educator who teaches courses through a critical lens, and he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center with research interests that center around Critical Race Theory, BlackCrit, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (CRSE), Healing Centered Engagement, and Racial Literacy, amongst other things. Moreover, Jordan also serves as the Chair of the State University of New York (SUNY) Black Faculty and Staff Collective (SBFSC) where the collective works to support Black folx at SUNY and beyond, as a For the Culture intern at Equity & Excellence in Education, and as an editor for New York University’s (NYU) Voices in Urban Education (VUE) Journal and Co-EIC for CUNY GC’s Urban Education journal, Theory Research and Action in Urban Education.  

Mentor: Allison Skerrett, University of Texas at Austin

Theresa Burruel Stone is Assistant Professor of English Education at Sonoma State University in the Department of English. Her scholarly work engages settler colonial studies and place-based inquiry to address the complicities and complexities of living dignified lives within U.S. white supremacist and settler colonial structures as racialized peoples, particularly for college-going, Mexican-origin youth. Their scholarship draws upon language socialization approaches to examine processes of racialization, whiteness, and settler colonialism within English Language Arts classrooms and college preparation programs designed for Latinx youth. Her research questions discourses of inclusion and belonging, pointing efforts for wellbeing towards place-based literacies and solidarity building beyond the wants of empire.

Dr. Burruel Stone completed their Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Culture in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier in her career, she spent eight years teaching English Language Arts and Puente at public high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California. They are the recipient of the 2020 AERA Latinx Research Issues SIG and the 2021 Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Awards and a CAE Concha Delgado Gaitán Fellow. Her work has been published in the International Review of Qualitative Research and supported by AERA, Division G.

Mentor: Renee Moreno, California State University, Northridge

José Luis Cano Jr. is a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at TCU. He investigates race, language, migration, law, and carcerality, especially as these forces shape public education and public rhetoric for students in the Brownsville-Matamoros area and in the Rio Grande Valley. Cano’s current project rhetorically approaches the relationship between citizenship and criminality at border checkpoints. He also teaches Latinx rhetorics and engages brown digital humanities. Prior to doctoral studies, he worked as a qualitative researcher at South Texas College and as an adjunct instructor at Texas Southmost College. In addition, Cano has worked at the high school level as a teacher and college adviser. He serves as a managing editor for constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space, and his work appears in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric Technology, and Pedagogy, Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies, and Rhetoric, Politics & Culture.

Mentor: Antero Garcia, Stanford University, CA

Autumn A. Griffin is a researcher with an affiliation at the University of Pennsylvania. Having previously taught secondary ELA in Atlanta, Georgia, her research explores how Black youth use literacies as a means to heal from pedagogical and curricular violence. She focuses mot closely on Black youth’s multimodal and digital literacies, young adult literature, and humanizing and healing literacy curricula and pedagogy, and draws upon Black Girlhood and Black Feminist theories in work. Autumn’s work has been published in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Urban Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Language Arts, and Multicultural Education and she is currently working on a book with colleagues Ebony Elizabeth Thomas & Joshua Coleman. Autumn is also the co-founder of the digital network Blackademia, a platform built to explore the historical and contemporary experiences of Black women in the academy and to support Black doctoral students on their journeys by offering community through its podcast, blog, and virtual book chats. In her spare time, Autumn teaches yoga and loves combining yoga with Black Feminist practices of healing to create sacred spaces for Black women and girls.

Mentor: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Dr. Sharim Hannegan-Martinez is a daughter, sister, prima, educator, organizer, and lover of young adult fiction and boxing. Informed by her experiences growing up on the San Diego-Tijuana frontera and her time as a high school English teacher in East Oakland, her research agenda examines the relationship between trauma, loving pedagogies, literacy, and student wellness, particularly as it relates to Students of Color. Her most recent study explores the pedagogy of loving relationships— cultivated in part by the literacy practices employed by teachers — as an intervention to traumatic stressors within the context of urban classrooms. Her work has been published in several journals including Teachers College Record, Urban Education, and Urban Review. She is a founding member of the People’s Education Movement, Bay Area, and currently works as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky. She earned her Ph.D from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where her dissertation was recognized by the Ford Foundation’s predoctoral and dissertation year fellowships, and was awarded ‘dissertation of the year’ by American Educational Research Associations’ Division G: Social Contexts in Education.

Mentor: Sybil Durand, University of Arizona, Tucson

Dr. Alicia K. Hatcher earned her B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, her M.A. in English from North Carolina Central University, and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication from East Carolina University. Her research focuses on embodied, spatial, and cultural rhetorics, specifically the ways bodies and spaces are used as rhetorical and symbolic tools in the fight against systemic oppression. Her current scholarship centers on the concept of performative symbolic resistance (PSR), which she defines as the use of specific verbal and nonverbal motions, acts, or series of actions as a languaging strategy to symbolize protest of a socially constructed system of oppression, and which she describes as a methodological analytical tool that scholars of rhetoric can use in their continued efforts to illustrate how performance, performativity, and symbolism are and can be used to engage in acts of resistance. In 2021, Dr. Hatcher served as an interviewer for NCTE’s Cultivating New Scholars program, and she is currently co-editor of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics’ Comics/Visual Rhetorics, Decoloniality, and Liberatory Futures special issue slated for publication Winter 2022. Her article “Introducing Performative Symbolic Resistance” is forthcoming in Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space.

Mentor: Laura Gonzales, University of Florida, Gainesville

Ileana Jiménez’s doctoral research in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, focuses on Black and Latina feminisms in schools; feminist digital and school-based activism, and feminist research methodologies. She is a recognized leader in the feminism-in-schools movement and is the founder of feministteacher.com and creator of the hashtags, #HSfeminism and #K12feminism. An English teacher-activist for 25 years, she teaches intersectional feminist pedagogies and curricula to high school and graduate students as well as teachers. She often writes about her high school classes on women of color feminisms; queer literature; Latinx literature; and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In 2011, she received a Distinguished Fulbright to interview queer and trans students in Mexico City’s high schools. Globally, she has presented on critical feminist pedagogies in Argentina, Australia, Greece, India, Mexico, and the UK. She has chapters in Gender in an era of post-truth populism: Pedagogies, challenges and strategies (2022) and Youth sexualities: Public feelings and contemporary cultural politics (2018), and has articles in journals such as Meridians and Radical Teacher. She received her B.A. in English Literature at Smith College and an M.A. in English Literature at Middlebury College. She can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: @feministteacher.

Mentor: Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University, NJ

Naitnaphit Limlamai, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Colorado State University where she teaches and studies secondary English teacher preparation and how that work manifests justice. Specifically, she investigates how justice is defined, constructed, and enacted in secondary English methods classes and how those ideas travel from university preparation coursework to student teaching classrooms. Her additional interests include how writers develop as such and collaboration.

In addition to her research and teaching, Naitnaphit co-chairs the ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE) Mentorship Committee and served as the diversity, inclusion, justice, and equity chair of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English. Before earning her doctorate degree, Naitnaphit taught high school English for 13 years in public and private schools in Florida, Georgia, and New York.

Naitnaphit grew up in Southern California and earned her BA in Human Development and Philosophy from the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She completed the Alliance for Catholic Education program and taught high school English and French to earn her M. Ed from the University of Notre Dame. She earned her doctorate degree from the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan.

Mentor: Tim San Pedro, The Ohio State University, Columbus

Pratigya Marhatta is a Ph.D. candidate in the Educational Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Her research focuses on supporting pre-service and in-service teachers in creating equitable learning environments in elementary spaces. In particular, she examines how critical pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogies can be incorporated into the primary classroom. In a parallel line of scholarship, she also looks at the educational experiences of students from recently resettled backgrounds. As a second-generation immigrant, Pratigya is committed to ensuring that schools are equitable for multilingual students. Her research has resulted in publications in Multicultural Perspectives, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, and the Journal of Social Studies Research; as well as presentations at local and national conferences that include the American Educational Research Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Literacy Research Association.

Mentor: Susi Long, University of South Carolina, Columbia

Tamara Moten is a doctoral candidate in the Language and Literacy Education Department at the University of Georgia. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she taught literacy in Chicago public schools and academically advised collegiate athletes while completing her bachelor’s degree in English and master’s degree in Instructional Leadership at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a former collegiate gymnast and literacy educator, her research interests unite at the intersection of Black girl literacies and transformative justice practices that invest in the experiences of Black and African American youth. Inspired by her experiences as an athlete and literacy educator, she co-founded an organization, Black Gymnast Tribe, to create healing spaces for athletes and gymnasts of color. Her doctoral journey has included teaching preservice teachers, organizing a language and literacy conference, assisting in a justice as praxis conference, and presenting at numerous sports and education conferences. Tamara has recently published a co-authored journal article, “Looking Back and Learning Forward: Cultivating Robust Literacy Instruction and Joy among Black Elementary Boys.”

Mentor: Carmen Kynard, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth

Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson is a Bridge to the Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned a BA in American Studies and Political Science from Macalester College, a MA in Literacy Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a PhD in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her research commitments center young people and their communities, Black girls’ literacies, Black geographies, and storytelling. Her current scholarship stems from her dissertation work, which considers the literacies of Black girls who call New Orleans home, their communities, and their relationships to place. She employs various practices and pedagogies for this project to highlight the multiplicity of Black girls and their homes, including ethnographic and narrative research approaches alongside Black feminist storytelling and geographic praxis. As a former secondary English teacher and current teacher educator, Reine Johnson is excited about critical research endeavors that support young people, with attention to how they story and shape place and space through their language and literacy practices.

Mentor: Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Renée Wilmot is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University. In her studies, Renée focused on advanced qualitative methods, social foundations of education, as well as race and equity. Her research primarily explores two themes: (1) the historical legacy of Black women as educators and activists in the Black community and (2) Black girls’ practices of thriving and resisting in white supremacist schooling structures. Renée’s approach to research draws from historical methods, participatory action research (PAR), and Black Feminist Epistemologies (BFE.) Prior to her doctoral studies, Renée was a proud Secondary English/Language Arts teacher at Church Hill Academy in Richmond, VA. She received NCTE’s Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award in 2016. She is an alumna of Boston College’s Donovan Urban Teaching Scholars program, where she earned her M.Ed. with a concentration in Urban Education and Secondary English Education. Renée earned her B.A. at the University of Virginia where she double majored in English Literature and African and African American Studies.

Mentor: Qiana Cutts Givens, Mississippi State University

Alexis Morgan Young is a doctoral candidate in the Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership with a specialization in Urban Education at the University of Maryland-College Park. She holds a BA in Elementary Education and a Master of Arts in Teaching and Curriculum, both from Michigan State University. She is a former K-5 teacher who was educated, and taught, in Detroit Public Schools. Alexis’ scholarship centers the liberatory literacies of Black girls in elementary and middle schools. Specifically, she seeks to illuminate the utility of Black girls’ imaginations in liberatory projects, particularly in the reconceptualizing of education. She works in concert with preadolescent Black girls to co-create spaces that forefront their expertise and imaginative practices to foster environments where they can enrich their critical consciousness, dream of otherwise worlds, and have their recommendations for the future recognized as valid knowledge. Her research speaks to the importance of seeing Black girls as whole, imaginative beings who are not passive actors in their education or in society. Above all, Alexis’ work challenges us to (re)imagine a world where Black girls are seen as experts and change agents toward their liberation. 

Mentor: fahima ife, University of California Santa Cruz