Radically Inclusive Teaching With Newcomer and Emergent Plurilingual Students

Book excerpt: Learn how to enact curricular, pedagogical, and policy shifts that nourish students’ linguistic repertoires, redefine teaching and learning as reciprocal endeavors, promote student-to-student interactions that help newcomers feel less isolated, and create opportunities for students to experiment with language in both academic and informal settings. Drawing on their experience working with hundreds of educators and thousands of students in linguistically diverse school settings (grades 7–12), the authors challenge readers to engage in critical, collective action as they transform their approach to languaging, agency, and authority in the classroom. Ideas and strategies come alive through classroom vignettes, student stories, and samples of student poetry, prose, and art—as well as examples of linguistically affirming approaches to online teaching. The book is an enlightening professional conversation that represents the importance and impact of multicultural and culturally responsive education that ultimately leads to linguistically inclusive education for newcomers and other language learners. Book Features: Draws from classroom-based research in linguistically diverse school districts in Southern California that use an arts-based, multiliteracy enrichment program designed for newcomer and emergent bilingual students.Examines the ideological, curricular, pedagogical, and political factors that shape the daily experiences of students who are new to the United States and in the process of incorporating English into their linguistic repertoires. Shows examples of how educators create classrooms where newcomer and emergent bilingual students’ identities, languaging, and humanity are invited, affirmed, and amplified. Features the voices of students who courageously explore their identities, experiment with their voices, and share their vision of what a radically inclusive community can be.