Black and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non-academic contexts. It also reveals how these students responded to a critical language pedagogical innovation. In particular, I explored how AAL-speaking students in two ninth grade English Language Arts classrooms understood themselves linguistically across multiple contexts and to determine if their engagement with a Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) could transform their unfavorable attitudes toward AAL. Based on findings from this study, I drew the following conclusions: (1) the students understood AAL to be a linguistic resource with associated consequences in their everyday lives, (2) the students resisted and held negative attitudes toward AAL before the CLP innovation, and (3) the students' responses following their engagement with the CLP suggested that the innovation impacted their attitudes in important and dramatic ways.
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