The Justice Language Action Project

This chapter presents the Justice Language Action Project, an educational outreach project that provides professional development in critical discourse analysis and language awareness to K-12 teachers and assists them in incorporating these perspectives into social justice-themed curricular units for their classrooms. The project was designed to address the needs of teachers in urban districts with high numbers of English learners and other minoritized students. These teachers were working to respond to the unprecedented challenges of the 2020–2021 school year—specifically, the longstanding educational inequities exacerbated by the pandemic and the traumatic events that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement across the nation. First, the authors describe the four-day workshop that they led in August 2021. Next, they describe the units that teachers created and their experiences, successes, and challenges in implementation. The chapter offers this model to other linguists seeking to engage in community partnerships to foster equity and inclusion in K-12 classrooms.