Abstract
This chapter will explore how teachers work for social justice by advocating for emergent bilinguals. Four sites in which advocacy can be enacted—the classroom, the school, family and community, and larger sociopolitical structures—are used as a framework for organizing the research. Each section begins with a real scenario experienced by a teacher of emergent bilinguals. These scenarios serve to illustrate the need to promote social justice and equity in that site. Each section will then outline practices, beliefs, and frameworks highlighted in recent research. In the classroom, effective curricular and instructional decisions will be explored. Ideas for collaborative structures in the school are described. Effective methods of outreach to families and community partners are discussed, and activism in society and political organizations is explained as a necessary step to improve the long-term outcomes of emergent bilinguals in school and society.
TopBackground
Discussions about the school success of emergent bilinguals usually begin with an examination of the opportunity gap that exists between these learners and their native English speaking peers. However, the standardized assessments used to compare emergent bilinguals and their peers “prevent [emergent bilinguals] from using more than half of their linguistic repertoire” and “only validate the language practices of dominant monolingual groups”, emphasizing the differences between groups and perpetuating deficit ways of thinking about emergent bilinguals (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2020, p. 567). The oft-quoted statistics around emergent bilinguals’ school achievement do not address the inequitable opportunities provided to this population or the root causes of school challenges for marginalized populations.
Of crucial importance is emergent bilinguals’ access to language and content instruction that meets their needs. In terms of language instruction, there are not enough licensed English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers to support emergent bilinguals in the United States; 19 states and Puerto Rico reported shortages in the 2020-21 school year (United States Department of Education, 2021). For content instruction, emergent bilinguals tend to be placed in general education classrooms for much of the school day (Mills et al., 2020). Since only 40% of public school teachers reported having taken a course on supporting emergent bilinguals before entering the field (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021b), the majority of emergent bilinguals continue to be left to sink or swim in these content area classrooms. Emergent bilinguals need equitable access to grade-level content, not just equal exposure to the general education curriculum provided by teachers who feel unprepared to work with them (Wessels et al., 2017).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Word-Level Features: Specific words and phrases used in language to create precise and technical meaning in academic texts. These words may be content-specific (e.g., photosynthesis ) or cross-curricular (e.g., analyze ).
Family Engagement: A two-way system of communication and support between schools and families, enacted for the dual purposes of improving academic outcomes for students and assisting families in having their needs met.
Subtractive Bilingualism: The perspective that an individual should abandon using their home language to become proficient in the dominant language of a location or culture.
Emergent Bilingual: A student who is proficient in their home language and is gaining proficiency in English in school.
Discourse-Level Features: Specific structures used in academic language to bring clarity and coherence to texts containing more than one sentence (e.g., sequential words like first , next , then when telling a story in chronological order).
Sentence-Level Features: Specific structures used in academic language to build correct and clear sentences (e.g., adverbial phrases).
Advocate: An individual who uses their voice to lift up the concerns and needs of an individual from a marginalized population to those in power. Advocates are concerned with social justice and equity for those with whom they work.