I’ve been thinking a lot about my roles as teacher educator, daughter, mother, partner and friend during these times. I’ve listened to my body closely (especially as a new parent) and like many of you, my mind, spirit, and body are so exhausted with the weight of it all that it takes a whole lot to focus. And so, here’s a little bit of what I’ve been directing a lot of my energy towards lately: planning my graduate course in a teacher education program.
This summer (which actually started yesterday for me on the college calendar), I’m teaching a course titled on language learning in a linguistically diverse society. For the last few months, I’ve been engaged in conversations with colleagues about racial literacy, emergent bilingualism, creative and experimental spirit, and developmental variations at Bank Street Graduate School of Education. We’ve conducted inquiries on our syllabi and really asked the tough questions about how we were addressing (or not) some of these in our courses.
Is some of the work implied?
Are we being clear about our goals and addressing racial literacy?
There’s the conversation around intentionality and inquiry. For example, do we name critical lenses at the start or encourage/facilitate so that students come to these on their own (hopefully).
So here’s where I’m at with all of this. I’m guided by a sense of urgency, clarity and inspiration, some of which you’ll see here as I share my thought partners and co-instructors in this course! Hope you reach out if you’re on the same journey as we are in this course, whether on your own, with teachers, administrators or teacher-educators. Would love to learn of other texts, thought partners and ways that you center and validate the language practices of language-minoritized children in all learning spaces.
Course Description
The language practices of language-minoritized students are often deemed incorrect as measured against white, monolingual norms. This course reimagines language learning by moving beyond the study of language as a system (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse), and applying the critical lenses of raciolinguistic ideologies and translanguaging theory and pedagogy to the process of languaging. In the first part of the course, we’re focusing on processing language ideologies, identities and anti-Black linguistic racism. It’s really important to me that we address these matters at the start of the class, name them, and consider our roles/positionality in how we are moving towards a more equitable learning experience for all children. In the second part of the course, we will study how raciolinguistic ideologies take shape in curriculum and teaching and how we can disrupt these with translanguaging pedagogy and authentic assessments of bilingual and multilingual learners. We will study ways to integrate family and community literacies, the arts, and multimodal learning in the planning of instruction and nurturing relationships that validate linguistically diverse practices.
Sessions
First Week of the Course*
*Will be adding overview videos for the other weeks soon! First, need to reflect on week one with students and get a sense of what needs to be revised.
References
It’s been months of conversations on this with teacher educators who have taught this course and making sure I bring in the latest research and writing on the critical frameworks we are applying in the course. Really grateful to two colleagues, Pam Jones, instructor at Bank Street, and Amía Soto-Carrión, also an instructor at Bank Street and 4th grade bilingual dual language teacher in NYC (Amía was also my former student at Hunter College, CUNY so it was super special to get her feedback on the course as she taught it).
Who we cite matters! See #CiteBlackWomen.
I continue to revisit the texts and references making sure we do this right.
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