• Why is ELL support not provided for children who speak pidgin, creole, and African American English (AAE) at home?

• Standardized test scores from children who speak pidgin, creole, and AAVE languages are lower than their standard English-speaking counterparts.

• Would test scores increase if the academic language (CALP) teaching strategies were taught in classrooms across the U.S.?

• Could students be identified as limited language proficient in an academic language only?

Your first words begin your relationship with language. The language you first learn connects you to your family and community and allows you to share information, thoughts, and feelings.  What if you were made to feel that the language you speak is less than another language, that it is not good enough? When you arrive at school, you share your language with your peers. It must be painful to hear that you need to speak properly. That your grammar is incorrect. That your home language isn’t appropriate for school.  Pidgin/creole languages are rooted in the need for communication among at least two or more languages. Often, pidgins grew out of trade towns or plantations and workers who were in the field. 

My desire to study this topic came from teaching in Hawaii for over a decade. The children spoke Hawaiian pidgin as their first language. No matter how much reminding from the teachers to speak "school language" the children always reverted to what they knew. There is personal identity in language and feelings of security. 

Reflexivity for Restorying the Ontological and Epistemological Truths in Qualitative Research

Lee-Johnson, Y. L., Fair, K., O’Connor, K., Rodney, T., Ono, J., & Dixon, T. (2023). Reflexivity for Restorying the Ontological and Epistemological Truths in Qualitative Research. Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice, 8(4), 43–49. https://doi.org/10.5195/ie.2023.339

Fall 2022 Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate Convention (CPED) 

Presenter for the panel discussion, “Transforming a Transdisciplinary Ed.D. with Equity-Centered Scholarship for Practice.”

One of the contributing authors in the international best-selling book, Growth.

Ono, J. (2022). Double D's. Growth. MCD Press. 

Adapting an Ethnographic research to an online survey amid covid-19: transformative lens in educational research

Lee-Johnson, Y. L., Flewellen, V., Fair, K., O’Connor, K., Dixon, T., Ono, J., Spencer, A., Singler, J., Schmuke, M., Hanses, J., Barton, A., & Rodney, T. (2022). Adapting an ethnographic research to an online survey amid covid-19: transformative lens in educational research. In SAGE Research Methods Cases. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529799736

An invited Plenary Speaker: Radical Transformation for K-12 schools.

Ono, J. (2022). Radical Transformations for K-12 Schools. School of Education Special Event: Teaching at Crossroads. Webster University. March 29.