En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students

"This book provides practical help for undoing the deficit perspective that is frequently applied to Latinx bilingual students. This deficit perspective limits educators from getting to know bilingual learners and has lasting effects on children's self-concept, socio-emotional growth and academic development. As emergent bilingual Latinx children become the majority in PK-12 schools, and as Latinx communities face increasing socio-political hostility, it is urgent that we shift to teaching practices that honor the knowledge students engage every day across different contexts. Schooling impacts how societal norms are reproduced, contested or reimagined, and the lessons, along with the pedagogical framework that we present in this book, can create that opportunity to fully embrace the ways we can connect with our students and have an impact beyond the classroom. This book offers lessons with a decolonized bilingual sustaining pedagogy approach: a culturally sustaining topic having to do with language practices, literacies, and power texts that show different ways we engage with language practices translanguaging (using all of one's linguistic repertoire, this includes different features of named languages such as Spanish and English) as the way bilingual students communicate, the way we teach, and the way we strive for social justice"--