Multimodal Literacies In Young Emergent Bilinguals

This book presents research focused on young emergent bilingual children’s multimodal meaning-making processes in diverse cultural and linguistic settings. Chapters draw on a range of theoretical frameworks and expand on traditional notions of literacy, especially for students who are working to learn English as a new language. The insights into original research studies will help readers understand the many avenues that one can take as a practitioner in order to ensure that student assets are built upon to promote positive literate identities and learning experiences and, ultimately, to promote literacy success for diverse learners. Each chapter includes practical pedagogical recommendations and implications for teachers that can immediately be applied to classrooms, making the book an essential resource for using multiple modes to teach literacy with diverse student populations.

This book features effective artistic practices to improve literacy and language skills for emergent bilinguals in PreK-12 schools. Including insights from key voices from the field, this book highlights how artistic practices can increase proficiency in emergent language learners and students with limited access to academic English. Challenging current prescriptions for teaching English to language learners, the arts-integrated framework in this book is grounded in a sense of student and teacher agency and offers key pedagogical tools to build upon students’ sociocultural knowledge and improve language competence and confidence. Offering rich and diverse examples of using the arts as a way of talking, this volume invites teacher educators, teachers, artists, and researchers to reconsider how to fully engage students in their own learning and best use the resources within their own multilingual educational settings and communities.

Young Emergent Bilinguals as Meaning Makers takes readers on a journey of the multimodal literacy experiences of over 125 young children learning English as a new language in U.S. public school classrooms. The book is filled with a plethora of student work samples, transcripts, and artwork produced with the author/researcher as part of their literacy centers. These examples illustrate the rich and sophisticated ways emergent bilinguals make meaning using everyday resources. This often goes unnoticed by monolingual educators who tend to value linguistic forms of learning. Insight is offered into using endpapers as cultural invitations for meaning-making during reading instruction as well as ways to assess the multimodal productions of children. There are plenty of implications for practice that include ways to use technology to enhance digital literacy skills, discursive moves, and specifics about ways to value artwork produced by emergent bilinguals. The book pushes for changes in school curricula and policy as a way to move beyond monomodal, monolingual, and monocultural ideologies and practices.

Literacy practices have changed over the past several years to incorporate modes of representation much broader than language alone, in which the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, etc. This book focuses on research and instructional practices necessary for integrating an expanded view of literacy in the classroom that offers multiple points of entry for all students. Projects highlighted in this book incorporate multiple modes of communication (e.g., visual, aural, textual) through various digital and print-based written formats. In addition, this book particularly focuses on the possibilities that this expanded view of literacy holds for emergent to advanced bilingual students and specific scaffolds necessary for supporting them. Our focus is specifically multilingual students as classrooms across the United States and other English-speaking countries around the world become more and more diverse. The book considers educators as active participants in social change and contributors to our overall goal of social justice for all. This book grew out of work conducted by doctoral students and former doctoral students, now faculty at various universities, from the Language and Literacy Learning in Multilingual Settings (LLLMS) specialization in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, Florida. The most outstanding feature of this work is the breadth of examples for integrating literacy in the classroom, as well as the specific instructional strategies provided for supporting multilingual students. This volume is unique in tackling both literacy and specific scaffolding for multilingual students. Additionally, the chapters here collectively aim to go beyond describing research to also provide a variety of classroom connections for practitioners and implications for teacher education.

This edited volume takes the US-derived concept and praxis of funds of knowledge and applies it globally to critically analyse current education in line with social justice, antiracism, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Edited by one of the premier international voices for the funds of knowledge approach, and in particular funds of identity theory, chapters foreground first-hand, participatory, research-practice experiences with learners, schools, and local communities. These experiences demonstrate the positive, social-justice inspired pedagogical actions that result in, and reveal, powerful possibilities for a decolonialised, antiracist praxis that aims to eradicate deficit thinking in education. Further, the inclusion of voices that are typically "othered" in the construction and distribution of academic knowledge make this a seminal volume in the field. Ultimately, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers working in the sociology of education, psychology of education, and those specifically dealing with antiracism, decolonialism, and equity within education.

Offering a wealth of art-based practices, this volume invites readers to reimagine the joyful possibility and power of language and culture in language and literacy learning. Understanding art as a tool that can be used for decolonizing minds, the contributors explore new methods and strategies for supporting the language and literacy learning skills of multilingual students. Contributors are artists, educators, and researchers who bring together cutting-edge theory and practice to present a broad range of traditional and innovative art forms and media that spotlight the roles of artful resistance and multilingual activism. Featuring questions for reflection and curricular applications, chapters address theoretical issues and pedagogical strategies related to arts and language learning, including narrative inquiry, journaling, social media, oral storytelling, and advocacy projects. The innovative methods and strategies in this book demonstrate how arts-based, decolonizing practices are essential in fostering inclusive educational environments and supporting multilingual students’ cultural and linguistic repertoires. Transformative and engaging, this text is a key resource for educators, scholars, and researchers in literacy and language education.

This book presents one possible pathway towards the advancement of translanguaging pedagogies: teacher–researcher partnerships. Although the existing literature alludes to the value of such partnerships, there is a lack of research that explicitly describes the complex processes of designing and implementing translanguaging pedagogies in primary and secondary school settings (K-12) across various international contexts. Through an expanded focus on teacher–researcher collaboration and the negotiation process, the book unpacks the opportunities and challenges of engaging in contextualized translanguaging designs with reference to broader ideological discourses and systemic structures. By promoting and highlighting teacher–researcher partnerships as one avenue for improvement and transparency, the chapters in this book demonstrate the potential of translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms and further resist the linguistic hierarchies that exist in educational institutions today.

The roles of school leaders are ever-expanding. Along with the increase comes heightened expectations to create and sustain school environments that embrace the cultures of all students and families. To accomplish this optimally inclusive learning culture and climate, school leaders must possess the acumen to view all aspects of their responsibilities through a culturally responsive lens, hence, culturally responsive leadership. Culturally Responsive Leadership for Social Justice and Academic Equity for All offers a multi-faceted approach to culturally responsive leadership as it connects the concept to the various responsibilities of school leaders. The book also challenges school leaders to see the connective and comprehensive nature of culturally responsive leadership in their daily duties and responsibilities, introduces the concept of culturally responsive leadership and its benefits for all students, and prompts and initiates an educational leadership mindset that seeks to explore the impact of culturally responsive leadership further. Covering key topics such as equity, school culture, and professional development, this premier reference source is ideal for administrators, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, students, preservice teachers, and teacher educators.