5 Ways (Plus a Bonus) to Celebrate National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month
April is National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month. For too long, our Emergent Bilingual and Emergent Multilingual students have been treated as less than in our classrooms. Known as English Learners throughout the country, the education system has focused on what students lack rather than what students bring to the classroom, and these supposed deficiencies have…
Confusion Is Not a Reason to Keep Our Kids From Becoming Bilingual
“But won’t my child (the kids) get confused?” “Don’t the kids get confused if they are learning more than one language at the same time?” I am often asked various versions of this same question as parents and educators worry about placing children in Dual Language Education classrooms. This question suggests that learning multiple…
5 Reasons Two-Way Dual Language Programs Can Become Less Than Two-Way and What to Do About Them
What is the difference between Two-Way and One-Way Dual Language programs? Instructionally? Absolutely nothing. In both, content instruction time in both languages should be at least 50% in the Language Other Than English (LOTE) with Language Arts being taught in both languages each year. Our goals of High Academic Achievement in both languages, Bilingualism and…
Stress Is Not Always A Bad Thing
Throughout this blog, we’ve often talked about the dangers of the pobrecito syndrome. The pobrecito syndrome is an adult mindset where we feel so sorry for certain students, often our language-minoritized populations, that we don’t have the same high expectations that we have for our monolingual, English-speaking students. The pobrecito syndrome is rooted in the…
Racial Equality in Education Across States – A Few Observations
Educational social justice requires us to eliminate the opportunity (achievement) gap between subgroups of students. In other words, when we see a historically minoritized group of students on average not performing as well as white students, we are required to fix the disparity. Opportunity gaps exist among racial groups throughout the country. A legacy of…
Productive Struggle – An Antiracist Teaching Strategy
A sincere lack of belief in students of color and students who are linguistically diverse is often the most salient factor in perpetuating the opportunity gaps the same, aforementioned students suffer. That’s a hard pill to swallow when often we want to blame every other factor under the sun for schools’ low accountability scores. These…
Societal Suppression of POC Anger
I’m taking a break this week to welcome my guest blogger, Jeena Ann Kidambi, 13, who decided to tackle the idea of society’s expectations for people of color to suppress their anger when they experience racism. The powerful essay compares Jeena Ann’s own experiences to those of the students in Dashka Slater’s new book, Accountable…
Tone Policing – What is it? How do I address it?
At our schools, districts, and/or organizations, we need to ensure that the voices of those who have been historically marginalized are heard. This is especially the case when our minoritized colleagues state that an action or statement has caused harm. Nevertheless, in lieu of validation, what we often hear is defensiveness as seen in the…
Cultural Humility – The Flip Side of Sociocultural Competence
We all know the three pillars of Dual Language Education: Grade-Level, Academic Achievement in both languages, Bilingualism and Biliteracy, and Sociocultural Competence. However, the more I delve into these pillars, the more I am convinced that these three pillars are not enough… that with sociocultural competence must come the other side of the cultural coin,…
Why Cultural Assimilation Is Still the Wrong Ask
In spite of the work we have done as a field to be more accepting and welcoming of students with cultural differences, there continues to be a misguided push towards cultural assimilation. Companies that are supposedly dedicated to advancing equity continue to offer opportunities for parents to learn how to “assimilate to American culture.” Many…
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