Her award-winning book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, brings together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism (a term Baker-Bell coined) and white linguistic supremacy. Dr. Baker-Bell's latest research project involves collaborating with healthcare scholars and researchers to develop, implement and study antiracist medical curriculum interventions that support healthcare professionals with developing an antiracist praxis for confronting and reducing racial bias and anti-Black racism in medical and healthcare institutions.
Dr. Baker-Bell is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the 2021 Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award, the 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship, the 2021 Michigan State University’s Community Engagement Scholarship Award and the 2021 Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Creative Activity, the 2020 NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, the 2020 Theory Into Practice Article of the Year Award, the 2019 Michigan State University Alumni Award for Innovation & Leadership in Teaching and Learning, and the 2018 AERA Language and Social Processes Early Career Scholar Award.
Workshop Presenters
Kelly Blewett is assistant professor of English at Indiana University East.
Dr. Katie Booth is a tenured English faculty member at Moorpark College and loves to shake up academia. She is a passionate anti-racist, ungrader, and social justice warrior. With a PhD in Nineteenth Century British Historical Romance from the University of London, following her MA in English from Loyola Marymount University and BA in English from UC Santa Barbara, Katie has spent nearly 19 years as a classroom educator in California and England, even surviving the trenches of middle and high school, and finding her forever home in the California Community college system, where she sees her passion for equity and humanized education most useful.
Wendy Bourgeois is a writer, community college teacher, and poetry editor of the Literary Magazine The Gravity of the Thing.
Julie Caspersen Schultz teaches credit and noncredit mirrored English language classes at Sierra College. She has a passion for amplifying student voices and bringing linguistic justice to her classroom and the greater campus community. She hopes for linguistic unity and teaches self-advocacy so that her students feel comfortable bringing their whole selves into their communities no matter where they are in the language-learning process.
Tracy Fung teaches credit and noncredit English language classes at Palomar Community College and has a passion for linguistic justice in the area of English language pronunciation/speaking skills curriculum and instruction.
Julie Gamberg teaches English and humanities at Glendale College (GCC) and co-founded this conference last year after working with Michelle Gonzales and the Las Positas Next Level English team and seeing the impact that linguistic justice practices had on her own students and in her colleagues' courses. With Heather Ramos, she co-coordinates GCC's Language Equity Across Disciplines (LEAD) program and is exhilarated and inspired by the way that staff and faculty are rethinking their institutional practices around linguistic equity, together. Julie is also a poet, nerdy bookworm and mom of a teen!
Michelle Gonzales is one of the co-creators of the Next Level English curriculum, a series of lessons that bring linguistic justice practices, equity, and belonging to the classroom. She holds a BA in English/Creative Writing with a minor in Ethnic Studies and an MFA in English/Creative writing both from Mills College. She has twenty years teaching experience, the majority of which have been at Las Positas College, in Livermore CA, where she has taught in the Puente Program since 2012. The daughter of a Roosevelt High School supporter of the original Chicano Student Walkouts in Los Angeles, Gonzales has a special interest in ethnic literature, Chicano/Pachuco English, Spanglish, and subculture movements, topics on which she has previously written and published in the memoir The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band.
Tomas Guerrero is a full-time lecturer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, where he teaches First Year Writing courses and various other introductory courses designed to assist entering Freshmen with their transition from high school to college. Tomas is also a fourth-year doctoral student of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His research interests include pedagogy, mentorship, practical application of pedagogical philosophies, social justice & equity practices in academia, basic writing, and rhetoric & composition."
Natasha Haugnes began her career teaching English Language Learners and she has recently returned to the field. On her journey in between, she has been a teacher trainer for the Peace Corps, faculty developer at an art school, learning designer for a medical school, curriculum developer for a construction union, writing instructor in prison, textbook writer, and pedagogy instructor. The common thread that weaves through her various roles and settings is her commitment to improving teaching practices (especially her own) for students who have not been traditionally well-served by our education system.
Carmen Johnston has over twenty five years of experience in education, youth development and teaching. Carmen is dedicated to providing anti-biased, anti-racist, equitable educational experiences for all students. She is the co-founder of the Change It Now! Social justice leadership learning community at Chabot College and the Chabot Collaborative for Equity and Professional Growth.
Jasmyn Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum & Instruction with an emphasis in Literacy, Language, and Culture at Old Dominion University. Her research focuses on linguistic justice, anti-racist writing pedagogies, and centering Blackness especially in elementary language arts education. Thus, her research seeks to challenge anti-Blackness in language education and cultivate equitable and just language arts classrooms for Black students. She is a former elementary school teacher. Jasmyn gained invaluable experience working with students in first through third grade and spent most of her career as a fourth grade language arts teacher.
Dickson Lam is a Professor of English at Contra Costa College. He was also a founding teacher at the high school June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco. Lam is author of Paper Sons: A Memoir, and his work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, Hyphen Magazine, The Normal School, PANK, The Good Men Project, and The Rumpus.
Cynthia (Cyndy) Lopez Guerrero is a full-time lecturer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, where she teaches First Year Writing courses and various other introductory courses designed to assist entering Freshmen with their transition from high school to college. Cyndy is also a third-year doctoral student of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Her research interests include pedagogy, social justice & equity practices in academia, basic writing, and rhetoric & composition.
Carrie Marks is an English professor at Sacramento City College and a leader in social and linguistic justice.
Colette Meade is a Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) adjunct professor of English and College 101 as well as a part time instructor at California State University Northridge (CSUN) in English, Humanities and University Studies. She also works at the LAVC Academic Resource Center (ARC) as a tutor trainer and supervisor. She started her career at the ARC in 2012 as a Writing Tutor. She graduated from CSUN with a master’s degree in English Rhetoric and Composition in 2019.
Jamie Moore is a PhD Candidate at UC Merced and an English professor at the College of the Sequoias. She currently works with the Puente Project statewide office to develop curriculum and professional development trainings for Puente coordinators. She's presented her work at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity, the Association of American Colleges and Universities Conference, and the Strengthening Student Success Conference.
Justine Post is a feedback researcher and learning designer.
Kisha Quesada Turner is a Black graduate of PWIs which has made her long and hyper aware of the richness of Black Englishes and the under-utilization of them in classrooms. Her reflections of this gap drove her to pen "Niggas in English" in 2019, a letter to her students about her education and anti-Black academic experiences and a call for them to reflect on their own. At Las Positas College, where she works as a full-time professor, she has also been driven to facilitate conversations with her colleagues about antiBlackness in the field of teaching composition. Apart from this, she is an Umoja Learning Community practitioner, Black Student Union advisor, daughter of 90s Hip Hop, and a retired--but DOPE!--emcee. Her special interest in this project is Black Languages and Queer vernaculars.
Heather Ramos is an English Instructor at Glendale Community College (GCC). She co-coordinates GCC's Language Equity Across Disciplines (LEAD) program with Julie Gamberg, which includes co-facilitating a language equity course for faculty and staff at GCC. Her commitment to linguistic justice stems from her positionality as a biracial woman raised in Perris, CA, as well as her overall love for language. In her courses, she uses an interdisciplinary social justice lens to expose students to literary texts placed at the margins of academia, while discussing linguistic justice, health equity, environmental justice, and liberation movements.
Emily Solares is a first-year college student at Los Angeles Valley College. She is an English major and is currently working at the college’s writing center as a writing tutor. Emily plans on transferring to CSUN to receive her bachelor's degree in English and a single-subject teaching credential. She has also been considering pursuing a master's after receiving her bachelor's degree. After graduating, she would like to pursue teaching English.
Rachel Spangler is Puente English faculty at Sacramento City College and also teaches English composition in Folsom Prison.
Karin Spirn is an English instructor, writer, and martial artist living in Oakland, CA. She holds a BA in English with a minor in linguistics from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. She has nearly twenty years of community college teaching experience and currently teaches in the Puente Program at Las Positas College in Livermore, CA.
Inge Stockburger earned her doctorate in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University in 2011, and since then she has been teaching Composition and Linguistics at two-year and four-year colleges in DC, Chicago, and California. For the past seven years, she has been co-conspiring with students and colleagues at Santa Rosa Junior College where she is an Associate Faculty in English and a Writing Tutor at the Tutorial Center. Since 2020, she has also become an enthusiastic online asynchronous instructor!
Lizbett Tinoco is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M San Antonio.