Emergent Multilingual Learners in U.S. Schools

Catalog description

This course, offered as both an elective as well as a course required for students pursuing secondary teaching certification in Pennsylvania through the Bi-Co Education Program, operates from a heteroglossic and culturally and linguistically sustaining stance that has four intersecting aims. First, the course seeks to support students in a critical self-examination of the ways that language has shaped their lives and learning, particularly in the context of racism, linguicism, ethno- and euro-centrism, marginalization and austerity in schools and society. Second, students investigate the ways that both historical and contemporary educational policy concerning the education of EMLLs in the United States has operated from a monoglossic orientation that has limited programmatic and pedagogical options within the classroom to those that fail to address the lived realities and needs of this growing population of students. Third, students collaboratively research and present their findings on heteroglossic classroom language practices that, in contrast to those above, respect and leverage students' community cultural wealth and full linguistic repertoires. Fourth, students, drawing upon these findings as well as research on multiple language and literacy acquisition, hone their skills as curriculum designers and pedagogues, working to address EMLLs' diverse strengths and needs in mainstream classrooms and other educational settings. All four aims are bolstered by weekly fieldwork opportunities to learn with and from EMLLs and their educators in the Philadelphia area. Lottery Preference(s): 1. EDUC majors and Certification students; 2. EDUC minors; 3. then by seniority