Uplifting Indigenous Mexican Languages and Identities in Schools

We will soon be publishing Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students by William Perez and Rafael Vásquez.  In this post the authors set the stage for their book and discuss its importance.

Last June, Griselda Zarate, a young Indigenous Mexican-origin student, spoke to Spanish-language television about the racial discrimination she and her sister faced while attending the Santa Rita Union School District in Central California USA. The racism that students like Griselda face often spreads by other Mexicans and manifests by language-shaming for the way Indigenous Mexicans speak. Popular culture ridicules Indigenous languages as dialects, holding unequal power relationships against Spanish and English. As a result of these aggressions, the school district passed a resolution to prohibit the disparaging terms “Oaxaquita/o” and “Indito” which translate to “little Oaxacan” and “little Indian” referring to the widely held belief that Indigenous people from Mexico’s Guerrero and Oaxaca states are racially inferior. The district will also establish the first Indigenous Mixtec after school program so that children can have access to learning their language.

California is considered the state with the largest concentration of Indigenous Mexicans. By one estimate, about 800,000 Oaxacans have settled in Southern California and are mostly Zapotec peoples. These communities come from diverse cultures and often speak at least one of the 68 Indigenous languages of Mexico. Despite their rich social, cultural, and linguistic practices, they face many challenges in healthcare, the labor force, education, and other institutions due to historically lived discrimination.

After decades of living among and working with Indigenous communities in Los Angeles, we decided to conduct a study in Southern California with over 150 Indigenous youth from three groups: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and P’urhépechas. We wanted to find out what happens to Indigenous students who attend schools but largely go unnoticed, or when noticed, face scrutinization. In our book, Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students, we ask: how do Indigenous students experience school, given the traumas many have faced in Mexico for being labeled Indigenous, for speaking Spanish ‘with an accent’ due to the ‘inhibiting’ Indigenous ‘dialects’ they speak, or for coming from ‘underdeveloped’ communities and where society regards them as intellectually ‘inferior’? And how can schools be responsive and address the need to leverage Indigenous students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds to make meaningful connections to their schooling experiences so they can achieve equitable educational opportunities?

To answer these questions, we looked at students’ multilingualism from the perspective that languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken. Since many Indigenous youth experience language across and in between borders, we introduce a transcultural and translingual approach to illustrate the dynamic and intersectional processes that Indigenous youth engage to construct their identities and linguistic practices in social and educational settings. We emphasize adolescents’ agency in actively negotiating and constructing their identities and the influence of their non-Indigenous Mexican peers and teachers. Despite the verbal abuse youth face, the development of transcultural practices often serves to reinvigorate a sense of who they are and creates strategies to actively debunk anti-Indigenous beliefs. Therefore, the book intends to inform supportive environments that affirm Indigenous identities and languages, foster critical consciousness, and value the transnational experiences of Indigenous Mexican youth.

Studying Indigenous educational experiences and the critical issues these students face is significant to developing innovative approaches in Latinx cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and intra-group ethnic/racial relations. Educational researchers and policymakers will find the book of tremendous value, as it is the first book to our knowledge that examines the academic pathways and identities of Indigenous Mexican students. The findings of this study have the potential to inform local, state, and national policies affecting Indigenous migrant students. Adolescent development scholars will also find the book useful since few studies have been done examining migrant Indigenous youth identity development. We hope that our book contributes to education justice initiatives so that Indigenous students are invisible no more.

Please let us know your thoughts.  We’d like to hear from you.

Rafael Vásquez (rafael.vasquez@cgu.edu) and William Perez (william.perez@lmu.edu)

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Overcoming the Gentrification of Dual Language, Bilingual and Immersion Education edited by M. Garrett Delavan, Juan A. Freire and Kate Menken.

Teacher–Researcher Collaboration as a Pathway for Sustaining Translanguaging Pedagogies in K-12 Classrooms

This month we published (Re)imagining Translanguaging Pedagogies through Teacher–Researcher Collaboration edited by Leah Shepard-Carey and Zhongfeng Tian. In this post the editors explain how the book came about.

We identify as language educators and teacher educators with deep commitments to classroom practice, and have further centered our research endeavors in classroom contexts with different stakeholders (teachers, administrators, students, families, etc). Translanguaging pedagogies have been documented increasingly in a variety of classroom contexts, and have shown how honoring and integrating multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires can transform learning (e.g. Cioè‐Peña, 2022; CUNY-NYSIEB, 2021; Ossa Para & Proctor, 2021; Rajendram, 2021; de los Rios & Seltzer, 2017; Tian 2022). As a pedagogical framework, educators should take up ideological stances that value multilingualism, engage in intentional translanguaging pedagogical designs, and shift to meet the needs of learners in the classroom (García et al., 2017).

Adapting this pedagogical framework to co-stances, co-designs, and co-shifts (Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020), this edited volume emphasizes the potential of teacher–researcher collaboration as one avenue towards expanding the use of translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms. In 2018, we met on a panel at TESOL International’s annual conference and discovered that we were not only doing similar work on translanguaging pedagogies, but also shared a passion for collaborating with educators. Through discussion about our experiences, we observed how translanguaging pedagogies not only required critical and asset-based stances of multilingualism, but required educators (and researchers) to actively address systemic language ideologies and curricular barriers, among various other obstacles. Understanding the challenges of integrating translanguaging into school and classroom culture, we saw a gap in the literature of detailed accounts of how teachers and researchers could work together to design and carry out translanguaging pedagogies and address these challenges. As such, with our adapted framework as a guiding post, we ventured to explore the complex processes of collaborative partnerships in the context of translanguaging pedagogies.

This volume has been over three years in the making, which included the COVID-19 pandemic with both of us finishing dissertations and transitioning into faculty positions. Hence, we are so glad to be able to finally share this work with our communities. This volume aimed to showcase teacher–researcher collaboration from a variety of primary and secondary (K-12) classroom contexts. This included various content areas and program designs such as STEM, newcomer English-medium classrooms, dual immersion and bilingual education, world language, literacy, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). We also sought to incorporate international perspectives, with chapters from Australia, Austria, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan and the United States. Each of the chapters in this volume position teacher–researcher collaboration and classroom engagement as part of a larger approach to sustaining translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms and resisting the research-practice divide in education. The cover art, by the very talented Martha Samaniego Calderón, serves as a representation of these complex collaborative processes, illustrating how various members share and negotiate unique and invaluable knowledge and experience, which moves towards collaborative and transformative translanguaging praxis.

We are immensely grateful for the contributions in this volume, the scholars who have inspired this work (Ofelia García, Susana Ibarra Johnson, Kate Seltzer, CUNY-NYSIEB team and many more!). We believe that researchers, educators, and teacher educators will benefit from this work. We hope that, as one of the reviewers, Peter Sayer said, “[this] volume will serve as an important mentor text for researchers and practitioners who want to co-design and carry out collaborative translanguaging-focused projects in classrooms.”

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Translanguaging and English as a Lingua Franca in the Plurilingual Classroom by Anna Mendoza.

How is Third Language Acquisition Different from Second Language Acquisition?

This month we published Teaching and Learning Third Languages by Francesca D’Angelo. In this post the author explains what inspired her to write the book and what readers can expect from it.

Driven by a true passion for modern foreign languages, as a learner, teacher and researcher, I gained experience in teaching from secondary school to PhD level. What prompted me to write this book was the desire to convey the advantages of multilingual education to teachers, educators and language learners from different points of view: cognitive, linguistic and pedagogical. The work highlights the potential benefits of different types and levels of bilingualism, considering the effects of contexts of instruction, amount of exposure and method of acquisition of each language involved, challenging the idealised monolingual approach of language teaching. Language teachers, educators, learners and researchers dealing with multilingual education will particularly appreciate:

1) The broader, interdisciplinary approach of investigation of the phenomenon of bilingualism with a specific focus on the peculiar profile of additional language learners, making Third Language Acquisition a different area of research from Second Language Acquisition. Starting with a theoretical, introductive insight into bilingualism research conducted in different contexts across time, it questions the most widespread prejudices towards bilingual education and bilingualism, including confusion, language impairment and cognitive deficit, discussing the most prominent studies which demonstrate the benefits of bilingualism from a teaching and learning perspective.

2) The different implicit and explicit routes of acquisition available to language learners with practical examples of multilingual practice selected from the latest and most influential projects implemented worldwide. A critical discussion of the way each method of acquisition affects the development of different types and degrees of Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) is presented. More specifically, the academic debate regarding the non-unitary nature of this fundamental factor (i.e. cognitive or linguistic? Implicit or explicit?) and how it may facilitate and foster performance in additional languages.

3) The focus on the multilingual learner approach, rather than on the target language(s) with a native-like competence to achieve that has traditionally characterised multilingual education. Teachers and educators are presented as “connecting growers” with practical examples of innovative educational practices, in particular translanguaging, to fully exploit and give voice to all the multilingual and multicultural resources available in the classroom. The multilingual practices propounded and discussed aim at creating connections between languages, inviting teachers to resort to the whole multilingual background of the language learners. This could foster the process of teaching and learning third (or additional) languages, not only in terms of broader linguistic repertoire and linguistic skills already developed but also in terms of learning strategies, multicultural, and multisemiotic awareness.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Preparing Teachers to Work with Multilingual Learners edited by Meike Wernicke, Svenja Hammer, Antje Hansen and Tobias Schroedler.

Criando Niños Etiquetados: Discapacidad y bilingüismo en la vida de madres latinxs

In this post María Cioè-Peña, the author of our 2021 book (M)othering Labeled Children, writes about the recently-finished Spanish translation of her book. 

In Eric Alvarez’s 2021 review of my book, (M)othering Labeled Children (MLC), they wrote that MLC “will undoubtedly be an asset to researchers, policymakers, and teachers interested in bilingual education, disability studies, and special education.” I happily read on as Alvarez noted something that was important to me throughout the development of this manuscript: I wanted to produce a rich, complex, and jargon-free book accessible to teachers and service providers who may not be familiar with these mothers’ experiences and, simultaneously, had the capacity to enact change within their classrooms and institutions. However, Alvarez also noted that while MLC was accessible to some, by being available in English only, it ultimately alienated the families whose stories it tells adding that:

“to expand the book’s reach to the very people to whom it gives a voice, a future translation project into Spanish could be considered. If not, it seems that it will only perpetuate the marginalization of Latinx mothers…”

This perpetuation of marginalization through scholarship is an issue that I have raised in my own work, most notably in From Pedagogies to Research where I put forth a need to engage in culturally sustaining research practices that included “ensuring that participant communities have access to the knowledge they helped produce [… and] that the work is published in modes that are accessible and available to participants.” Within that piece I also shared that we should not “place fault solely on researchers, particularly researchers of color, who are bound to the ideology of ‘publish or perish’ to advance their careers.[…] experience[ing] pressure to disseminate their research products in prestigious venues over those that might directly benefit the communities they work alongside.” Which brings me to a guarded, but important, truth: I wrote MLC because my advisors demanded it of me, for the sake of my career and this content. I wrote MLC for professional growth, both mine and that of Emergent Bilingual Learners Labeled as Dis/abled (EBLAD)s’ teachers and service providers. Still, I knew that I wanted a translation to exist for the women who shared their stories, the parents navigating schooling experiences with their EBLADs today, and for the people who poured into me throughout my life (i.e. my Spanish-using aunts, uncles, and cousins) but especially, my own mother.

In late 2020, once the final manuscript for MLC was submitted, I identified and hired a translator, Pedro Guzmán. As much as we wanted the Spanish release to coincide with the English one, that wasn’t possible as we continued navigating work/life amid a pandemic. Alvarez’s review did not reach me until June 2022 but I am grateful for it because it motivated us to finish and on July 1st Criando Niños Etiquetados: Discapacidad y bilingüismo en la vida de madres latinxs became available for FREE. Parents can download a PDF, EPUB, or MOBI version straight from their phones. Ultimately, this translation was a labor of love: my amazing translator Pedro Guzmán refused to take payment, which removed all overhead costs, and the first reader was my mother who, while undergoing cancer treatment at the time, said she felt like it reflected so much of her experience. Her reading it and feeling seen was/is a gift.

I hope Criando Niños Etiquetados will help other parents and families of EBLADs feel seen.

You can access Criando Niños Etiquetados here.

The original English language text (M)othering Labeled Children is available on our website.

Remaking Multilingualism: A Tribute to Ofelia García

This month we published Remaking Multilingualism edited by Bahar Otcu-Grillman and Maryam Borjian – a book honouring the research and influence of Ofelia García. In this post the editors highlight some of the tributes made by contributors to the volume.

Multilingualism, bilingual education and how it is implemented in schools have often been controversial topics debated by politicians, academics, and educators in the United States and throughout the world. Among many scholars in the field, Professor Emerita Ofelia García has been a leader for 40 years, advocating for bilingualism, multilingualism and true bilingual education, not only for language minorities, but for all, and not only locally, but globally. An essential part of ‘dynamic bilingualism’ introduced by García, translanguaging stands out as a promising approach for the education of emergent bilinguals and constitutes people’s complex language practices in multilingual speech communities.

Remaking Multilingualism: A Translanguaging Approach is a tribute volume celebrating Ofelia García and her lifetime commitment to multilingualism and bilingual education within translanguaging perspectives via the eyes of her colleagues, former students, and friends. Through its collective chapters, the volume covers translanguaging in both its senses, as a discursive practice and as a pedagogical approach. It takes the reader beyond named languages and named nation-states to place the emphasis on us, human beings, the speakers of different languages and the residents of different parts of the world.

Dedicated to Ofelia García for her lifetime commitment to the cause of bilingual education, multilingualism and educational linguistics, the volume includes many tribute statements. Here are some excerpts from the book:

“Ofelia’s name is practically synonymous with translanguaging, that run-away concept that has captured the imagination of so many in the field of bilingual education. This is as it should be – a reflection of both Ofelia’s long and deep scholarship in bilingual education policy and practice and the creativity and imagination she brings to it.”
Nancy Hornberger

“Ofelia continues to challenge me on how to go beyond dichotomies such as research/practice, descriptive/political, or pedagogies/policies, and make more holistic contributions to our field.”
Suresh Canagarajah

“Ofelia García remains steadfast in her lifelong commitment to bilingual education. She refers to the systemic inequalities brought about by the hegemony of English, ‘whiteness’ and colonialism. From her early work she has been, and remains, inspirational in her ability to narrow the gap between theory and practice, engage with practitioners to improve the educational outcomes of students and take on powerful institutions which endorse harmful monolingual ideologies and exclude the everyday practices of bilingual learners. She is fearless in her ability to face resistance, speaking truth to power whenever and wherever she is able. Hers is a recognition that practice must lead theory, and not the other way round. Translanguaging is not merely a description of interactional contact, but an ideological orientation to communication and difference. In her warm, inclusive and engaging manner Ofelia García has reshaped the landscape of bilingual education, second language teaching and learning and education pedagogies more widely. We owe her a huge debt of gratitude.”
Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge

“Ofelia García’s enormous gifts of intellectuality, brilliance of thought coupled with her profound love for humanity are not the only characteristics of her academic endeavors that have awed and inspired many over the past several decades. Her immeasurable humility, warmth of character, abundant love and her sheltering personality have made her a true mentor, colleague and friend to many.”
Maryam Borjian

“Ofelia’s advocacy is above everything else. Her lifetime work on bilingual education and multilingualism, initially with Professor Fishman, and her translanguaging approach later, have provided the advocacy for those who speak minority languages and the guidance for educators and policymakers who regulate the minorities’ education. I am thankful to her for everything she did for me and others, for every idea she nurtured and pursued and for everyone she inspired to change the world.”
Bahar Otcu-Grillman

“This chapter foregrounds the perspectives of bilingual Latinx adolescent youth in reimagining school and classroom-level language allocation policy in ways that center the language practices and lived realities of youth. At the core, this approach is grounded in Dr. Ofelia García’s conception of translanguaging and dynamic bilingualism (2009), and our shared belief that children’s and communities’ language practices must be at the center of pedagogical and policy decisions. Using García’s theory of dynamic bilingualism, I outline four lessons from youth based on their reported language use and perspectives on bilingualism and translanguaging, then consider the implications of these lessons for language allocation policy, suggesting an approach to language policy that is grounded in both dynamic bilingualism and youth’s lived realities. Just as Dr. García conceived of translanguaging by studying the language practices of communities, the best way to serve multilingual youth is by listening to youth themselves, and letting their perspectives, experiences and language practices guide the creation of more equitable language policy.”
Sarah Hesson

“Both authors are former students of Ofelia Garcia and were also part of the CUNY-NYSIEB team.  Our approach to working with teachers of emergent bilinguals was rooted in the translanguaging pedagogy that evolved from Ofelia Garcia’s work. Over the years, Ofelia fostered spaces for collaboration that engaged educators in reimagining their schools and classrooms. Our work and the work of the teachers that we feature in this chapter are examples of how she inspired educators to open a space in which they could carefully analyze how learning was attuned to emergent bilinguals’ identities and socio-emotional development.”
Ivana Espinet and Karen Zaino

“If the term mentor entails being a counsellor with wisdom and experience, a generous and inspirational collaborator, and a loyal and empathetic friend, then Ofelia García is mentor par excellence.”
Jo Anne Kleifgen

For more information about this book, please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners by Jim Cummins.

Latinx Students and their Teachers Rompiendo Fronteras sin Miedo

This month we published Transformative Translanguaging Espacios edited by Maite T. Sánchez and Ofelia García. In this post the editors tell us what readers can expect from the book.

Even before you open this book, Transformative Translanguaging Espacios, you will be confronted with the image of Latinx students raising their fists without fear, sin miedo, drawn by Ángela Paredes Montero. The Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd, the #metoo movement, and the pause caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have given us the impetus to “lift the veil,” in the words of W.E. du Bois, to reveal the social and cognitive injustices of US language education policies for Latinx students. Sin miedo, and joined mainly by other Latinx scholars and teachers, this book shows how translanguaging spaces in education can weave a different tejido, a weave that is different from the tight knots that institutions have drawn around English and Spanish. The chapters here show how translanguaging spaces in education create openings through which we can view Latinx students and their communities desde adentro, so that from the inside, through their own knowledge system and ways of languaging, we can see their capacidad and inteligencia.

Sin miedo has been at the forefront of our trajectory with this book on the transformative power of translanguaging. Both of us have witnessed how opening up translanguaging spaces is transformative for Latinx students and the teachers who enable it. We bring the experience of CUNY-NYSIEB where Maite was project director and Ofelia was co-principal investigator. But we also have witnessed the refusal of many school leaders to allow their teachers to implement these spaces because they supposedly go against the strict language policies that are said to “benefit” students. We have seen teachers disagreeing with the possibilities of translanguaging pedagogical practices because they themselves were victims of elitist notions of academic standard language and additive bilingualism as separate languages. And we have experienced the fear of state education systems to adopt translanguaging theory and pedagogical practices because they thought that the teachers were just too unprepared, the students too deficient, and they too dependent on federal policies that made them mainly accountable for students’ “standard English.” After many years of trying to work with individual teachers and transform practices one by one, our outrage has enabled us to speak out sin miedo from the perspective of the Latinx students and communities themselves. The death of civil rights leader John Lewis, during the writing of this book, reminded us that it was time to get into “good trouble” – “Speak up, speak out, get in the way.”

Through this book, and thanks to the contributors in this volume, we get in the way of educational institutions that do not put racialized bilingual Latinx students and communities at the center of their efforts. We made a conscious editorial decision to begin the book with chapters that look at how translanguaging pedagogical practices open spaces to disrupt the trends of gentrification that are working against the interests of Latinx communities. That is, we are convinced that translanguaging pedagogical spaces must be foremost of benefit to the Latinx community for its own sociopolitical good. The question raised by Heiman, Cervantes-Soon and Hurie in their chapter – Good para quién? ­– must always be at the forefront of translanguaging pedagogical practices.

We identify and call out educational policies and practices that serve the interest of white dominant communities, families, and students, but that have been camouflaged as good for Latinx communities. The book questions, for example, the logic of the dual language/two-way immersion model that is becoming prevalent as the only way to bilingually educate Latinx students.

We have spent our academic careers working for the benefit of Latinx children and youth and upholding their right to bilingual education. At the same time, we have questioned and been critical of the assumptions that have been made about language, bilingualism, and language education policy. Career-wise, Ofelia is at the end of her academic path; but Maite and many of the other Latinx scholars in this book are moving along a camino that not only questions and disrupts established knowledge, but that also produces new knowledge. This book, in which Latinx theorists, scholars, educators, and students co-exist as agentive beings, reconfigures power and reinvents who can produce knowledge, who can name it, and who can access it.

We have insisted throughout the book that translanguaging is transformative. The chapters show ways in which real teachers and students engage with the transformative power of translanguaging.  Some chapters also envision what needs to happen so that these translanguaging transformative espacios can support the education of Latinx children and youth. The path P’alante with which Maite ends the book includes questions for educators so that they can reflect on ways in which translanguaging in education can be transformative for their own contexts. As Ramón Martínez and his colleagues say, translanguaging may not transform the material inequalities and systemic oppression that racialized bilingual students face, but it is transformative “in the everyday actions of students and their teachers.” The concepts of standard academic language and additive bilingualism that have plagued the education of racialized bilinguals in the US have only succeeded in producing academic failure and creating subjectivities of inferiority. By enabling Latinx communities and their children to become critically conscious of how language and bilingualism operates to produce their domination, translanguaging pedagogical spaces indeed are transformative. We hope that this book brings all of us – scholars, educators, students, communities — along a transformative path, as we take steps sin miedo to center the knowledge system and ways of languaging of Latinx communities in our efforts to enact a more equitable educational system.

Maite Sánchez and Ofelia García

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Bilingualism for All? edited by Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng and Nicholas Subtirelu.

“Being There” vs “Being Here”: Behind the Scenes of “English Learners’ Access to Postsecondary Education”

We recently published English Learners’ Access to Postsecondary Education by Yasuko Kanno. In this post the author takes us behind the scenes of the research presented in her book.

The hallmark of canonical ethnography, as Clifford Geertz once opined, is “being there”: You immerse yourself in a far-away place for months, even years, in order to document the cultural life of a group. But what if you are a full-time faculty member at a university with all the usual obligations of teaching and service? What if you also have a young child at home? Disappearing from the face of the earth to focus entirely on one’s ethnographic fieldwork doesn’t exactly fit into the reality of a working-parent academic. We need to be “here” teaching our classes, attending committee meetings, feeding our children while also trying to spend as much time as possible “being there.” It is under those conditions that I conducted my fieldwork for English Learners’ Access to Postsecondary Education.

I must say that the “balance” part of the (field)work-life balance went out of the window as soon as fieldwork began. For one thing, high schools in the United States start early. At Brighton High School (pseudonym), the site of this ethnography, the first class started at 7:46 am. To make it to the first class for an observation, I would wake up around 5:45 am, pack a lunch box for my eight-year-old, feed him breakfast, get ready myself, and leave home by 7am. Then, a typical fieldwork day would look like this:

7:35 am: Check in at the security desk at Brighton to get a visitor’s badge

7:46 – 9:05 am: Observe Alexandra in her geometry class

9:10 – 10:29 am: Dash to another room to make it to Carlo’s American Literature class—only to find him absent that day (once again!). I observe the class anyway.

10:34 am: Walk to the other end of the school building to Ken’s study hall classroom, pick him up, and we walk together to the library for an interview.

11:15 am: Finish the interview. I stay in the library and add to my fieldnotes before I go home.

I made it a rule never to leave the school premises for the day until I finished augmenting my fieldnotes because I knew that as soon as I left the field site, my second and third shifts as a faculty member and as a mom were waiting for me. When my fieldwork ran late in the afternoon, I would sometime arrive at my son’s school just barely before the afterschool care ended. I would then pick him up, drive home, make dinner, and then head out again for his soccer practice. While waiting, I might read an article for my next class—or if I was truly desperate, grade some papers. At night, after my son went to bed, I would finish up the outstanding emails for the day, noticing that other mom colleagues of mine with young children were also emailing after 11 pm.

But is an ethnography produced by the “new me” who has so many other responsibilities inherently worse than work by “PhD student me” who had the luxury of devoting weeks at a time to fieldwork? The answer is an emphatic no. For one thing, I am now a far more skilled and experienced ethnographer. I can detect, much faster and with far more clarity, how emerging patterns fit into a developing narrative and subsequently adjust my data collection to confirm or deny these initial assertions. For example, I was able to notice, early on, that high-level academic courses such as honors and advanced placement (AP) courses were essentially inaccessible to my participants because they were ELs. My early detection of this pattern then led me to observe honors and AP classes to find out what kind of learning my participants were excluded from. Also, my interactions with students and educators who hold vastly different worldviews from mine has, over the years, led me to become more self-reflective of my own biases. In this study, I worked with two very low-performing ELs, Carlos and Eddie, who were constantly at the edge of dropping out. Seeing their struggles to receive any kind of career guidance that did not involve college caused me to re-examine my own deeply-held bias that a college education ought to be a goal for everyone. I now firmly believe that effective career and technical education at the high school level can benefit students like Carlos and Eddie, who were not motivated to go to college but who had other talents and interests.

So, although starting another ethnographic project always throws a wrench into my already precarious work-life balance, it is the thrill of discovery and learning that takes me back to “being there” again and again.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Educating Adolescent Newcomers in the Superdiverse Midwest by Brian David Seilstad.

How Can Educators Promote School Success for Immigrant-Background Multilingual Learners?

We recently published Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners by Jim Cummins. In this post the author looks at how best to promote educational success among immigrant-background students.

Population mobility is at an all-time high in human history. The movement of people across national boundaries has resulted in significant increases in linguistic, cultural, ‘racial’, and religious diversity among school populations in countries around the world. Many of these students, whether born in the host country (second generation) or outside the host country (first generation) are experiencing academic difficulties according to multiple large-scale studies carried out over the past 20+ years by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Unfortunately, despite an abundance of research data on the nature and scope of underachievement, there is still no consensus among policymakers, educators, and researchers about which instructional practices will be effective in reversing the academic difficulties experienced by immigrant-background students.

In my recent book Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners, I proposed a framework that identified a series of evidence-based instructional strategies that educators, individually and collectively, could pursue to promote educational success among immigrant-background students. A first step in rethinking these issues was to ask the obvious question: ‘Which groups or categories of students are underachieving in our schools’? If we exclude students with special educational needs, international research identifies three groups that experience educational disadvantage: (a) students whose home language (L1) is different from the language of school instruction, (b) students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds and (c) students from communities that have been margin­alised or excluded from educational and social opportunities because of discrimination in the wider society. Not surprisingly, students who fall into all three categories experience the most persistent educational disadvantage.

The relevance of this for educational policies and instructional practices is that teachers, individually and collectively, must go beyond simply linguistic support and respond also to the constriction of students’ opportunities to learn brought about by economic exclusion and societal discrimination. Unfortunately, however, no consensus has emerged among researchers or educators about how schools can ‘push back’ against the societal conditions that give rise to ‘opportunity gaps’ associated with poverty and racism.

With respect to socioeconomic disadvantage, the OECD research suggests that schools could push back about one-third of the negative effects of low-SES if they could maximize students’ access to print and engagement with reading from an early age. For more than 20 years, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has documented strong relationships between reading engagement and reading achievement, but unfortunately, these findings have been largely ignored by policymakers, and even by the OECD itself.

Schools can also counteract the effects of racism and other forms of discrimination by implementing identity-affirming instruction focused on decolonizing curriculum and connecting instruction to students’ lives and the funds of knowledge of their communities. The essence of this instruction is that it challenges coercive relations of power operating in schools and society.

Additionally, language support should include not just scaffolding of L2 instruction but also engaging students’ multilingual resources and reinforcing their awareness of how academic language (ideally both L1 and L2) works across the curriculum.

These whole-school instructional directions are not just ‘theoretical’ – they are derived from inspirational instructional initiatives implemented in countries around the world. These initiatives reflect teachers’ role as knowledge generators working collaboratively with university-based researchers both to promote identities of competence and confidence among multilingual students and to enable them to use language powerfully to support their learning, and ultimately make a difference in their worlds.

The publication of Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners brings to a conclusion the Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights series that Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has edited with us over the past 20 years. It’s been an exciting collaboration and we thank both Tove and the Editorial Board for the interesting volumes that we’ve published and wish Tove all the best, and many more kilometres of lake-swimming, in the future! 

Tommi Grover, Commissioning Editor for the Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights series

Disability, Language and Mothering

This month we published (M)othering Labeled Children by María Cioè-Peña. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book.

I never sought to study mothers. To be honest, mothers were never really a part of my professional circle. Yes, I worked with women who were mothers and I also engaged with my students’ mothers, but I rarely saw mothers as an asset; truth be told, I probably didn’t really see them at all. I remember many of my former students but very few of their mothers – the ones I do remember often tended to be the “squeaky wheel” mothers – the ones who came across as “irrational” and “demanding”.  As an educator, I didn’t really think about mothers, not the way I do now.

To be clear, I thought about parents. As a special education teacher, I had been trained to communicate with parents, to consider their emotional capacities, particularly around disability diagnosis or program placements, as well as their education level when communicating information and interacting with them. I was taught to be a co-conspirator, always working with parents towards more inclusive placements. As a bilingual educator I was trained to be culturally responsive and to consider parents’ cultural identity and language practices when communicating. All of this was under the guise of compliance and rarely under the umbrella of collaborative partnerships. After all, I had been trained to believe that culturally and linguistically diverse families needed teachers like me to advocate for them.

My relationship with parents in many ways took on similar characteristics to my relationships with children in special education – I was a helper to the helpless, a voice for the voiceless, an advocate for the powerless. Thus, my relationship to parents took on the same deficit framing that plagues emergent bilinguals and students labeled as dis/abled. So it makes perfect sense that parents, especially mothers, were outside of the scope of my inquiries. This is not to say that I did not have beautiful and meaningful relationships with mothers. On the contrary, I credit those relationships with my growth both as an educator and as a researcher, but at the time I did not recognize them as a part of my practice, rather I saw them as another feather on my cap; another thing that I did that made me great.

I was really interested in studying the ways in which my teacher training had failed me. I recognized that my teacher training had been an amalgamation of parts (special education training with a bilingual extension or a bilingual education training with a special education extension) and as such had failed to prepare me, and others like me, for the unique challenges that a bilingual special education teacher might encounter. It wasn’t until I did a pilot study centered on teachers that a participant made a claim that shifted my whole perspective. When speaking about changes that had arisen as a result of special education reforms in NYC, changes that encouraged Emergent Bilinguals Labeled As Disableds’ (EBLAD) placement in monolingual English Inclusive Co-Teaching (ICT) classrooms over bilingual self-contained special education settings, she commented that she felt badly for the mothers because they had no say in this transition. The bilingual special education classrooms were closed and students were placed in monolingual ICT classes, and while the children could adjust, the mothers had lost a huge connection to their children’s learning. While in the bilingual special education setting they could encounter a teacher who spoke their home language – that was not true in the monolingual ICT classes.

That comment sat and rattled around my head for weeks and months, until finally I realized that the problem didn’t lie in my training. It originated from the fact that these children were being treated as the sum of their classifications: English language learners, students with disabilities, culturally and linguistically diverse, Latinx, etc. My training was a hodgepodge of programs because the students were being viewed as the sum of their parts rather than as whole. Thus, in order to foreground children as whole, I needed to step out of the classroom and into the home. I needed to center their foremost teacher: their mothers. They are the ones who saw their children as whole first. They are the ones who rooted their children’s differences in a disabilities studies perspective. They are the ones who saw their children’s bilingualism as a linguistic human right central to survival not just capitalism. In order to help EBLADs, I first needed to center mothers’ expertise and experiences.

This book, (M)othering Labeled Children, does just that. It centers mothers, their successes, their struggles (inside and outside of their children’s schooling), their ideologies on disability, language and mothering. In order to see children as whole, we need to see their parents, especially their mothers, as whole first. In doing this work, I have come to better understand myself as a teacher and as a mother. In these women’s testimonios I see my mother, my aunt, and myself. I hope that in reading this book others will see the complexity that is motherhood and the ways in which schools can make this work both easier and significantly more difficult. I hope that this book becomes a step towards a more inclusive school model.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Bilingualism for All? edited by Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng and Nicholas Subtirelu.

A History of Bilingual Education in the US

We recently published A History of Bilingual Education in the US by Sarah C.K. Moore. In this post the author briefly summarises the book’s content.

The Bilingual Education Act (BEA) (later Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to promote bilingual-bicultural education programs. Many experts have dissected its systemic undoing – what the author of my new book’s Foreword, Terrence G. Wiley, Arizona State University Emeritus Professor and former President of the Center for Applied Linguistics, has referred to as ‘the sunsetting’ and ‘grand erasure’ of Title VII. An initial goal in my research for this book was to better understand the ‘Title VII Fellows Program’ – it funded postgraduate students seeking Masters and Doctoral level degrees enrolled in universities as part of the BEA. In addition to the ‘Title VII Fellows Program’, myriad other activities once supported bilingual education in the US.

This book offers sociohistorical snapshots and revisits periods during which aid for bilingual programs existed on a national scale. Although perhaps fleetingly, a time did exist when bilingual education in the US was supported by federally administered services. ‘The Network’ of the 1970s and later was comprised of a countrywide system of resource centers serving a combination of regions and language groups, including for materials development, dissemination and assessment activities, and bilingual educator training.

By the 1990s, ‘bilingual’ education connoted a particular political stance – one either in favor of endorsing language as a civil right or against ‘affirmative ethnicity’ (made mainstream by conservative Washington Post columnist, Noel Epstein during the 1980s). We widely accept that the BEA emerged in part from the Civil Rights and Chicanx movements of the same era; it was also politically agreeable, which benefited its marshaling to passage.

Contemporarily, most multilingual education programs are labeled Dual Language Education – an arguably deliberate middle-of-the-road phrasing less ‘politicized’ than the sullied ‘bilingual’ education. Dual Language Education programs are expanding across the country rapidly and the three states targeted by the English-Only Movement (California, Arizona, and Massachusetts) have either overturned or pulled back emphasis on English-priority instructional approaches for Emergent Bilingual students. Notably however, numerous scholars have laid out in striking detail examples of racism, linguistic imperialism and prejudicial ideologies often underlying in characteristics and implementation of these programs.

Given the history of bilingual education programs and supports enabled by the BEA and Title VII, now may be a pivotal time to examine whether these could be re-conceptualized in ways that serve existing and new programs – and also, fundamentally, position language as a civil right – in harmony with the 1968 conception of bilingual-bicultural education.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Dual Language Bilingual Education by Kathryn I. Henderson and Deborah K. Palmer.