Social Justice for Multilingual Learners

Catalog description

This course introduces educators to foundational principles and practices for promoting social justice and educational equity while teaching multilingual learners in today's classrooms. A central component to teaching for social justice for students labeled as English learners (ELs), this course prompts educators to deconstruct their identities, experiences, and perspectives on cultural and linguistic diversity as a means to recognize and deconstruct language ideologies, deficit-based perspectives, personal biases, and institutionally driven assumptions. Framed by larger sociolinguistic and sociopolitical themes in the field of EL/bilingual education, educators explore students' diversity in their classrooms and schools and reflect upon current practice with that lens. Participants then draw from the literature to develop personal philosophy statements for serving multilingual learners with goals for their own professional learning.