Plenaries
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Dr. Ana Celia Zentella
Ana Celia Zentella is one of the foremost researchers in what she has named “anthro-political linguistics”. She is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latin@ varieties of Spanish and English, Spanglish, and language socialization in Latin@ families, and a respected critic of the linguistic profiling facilitated by English-only laws and anti- bilingual education legislation. Find out more about her by clicking here. At the TexLER Conference she will be presenting on the following topic: Occupying Spanish: Challenging the Racialization of Latin@s and their Languages with an Anthro-political Linguistics What if we “occupied Spanish” in the USA --on the model of those who demand that we occupy and liberate the centers of economic power-- by calling attention to ways in which language ideologies perpetuate discrimination against Spanish and foment hate crimes against Spanish speakers? In particular, we must challenge the remapping of race from biology onto language, which shifts racialization lodged in the body to racialization lodged in language and culture. Anthro-political linguistics encourages us to take concrete steps to intervene when schools, courts, employers, hospitals, politicians, and media reproduce linguistic prejudice by disparaging Spanish dialects, bashing Spanglish, and insisting on English only. |
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Dr. Deborah Palmer Deborah Palmer is an Associate Professor in Bilingual/Bicultural Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. A former two-way dual language bilingual teacher from California, she conducts qualitative research using ethnography and discourse analysis in linguistically diverse settings. Her interests include bilingual education policy and politics, critical additive bilingual education, teacher preparation for linguistically/culturally diverse teaching contexts, language and identity, and bilingual teacher leadership. She was the director of the Proyecto Maestría Collaborative, a National Professional Development Project that aimed to build teacher leadership and capacity in bilingual/ESL education in the Austin region. If you would like to learn more about her, please click here. At the TexLER Conference she will be presenting on the following topic: Agency Amidst Top-Down Implementation of a Dual Language Bilingual Program: Teachers and students co-constructing bilingual identities. If you have to be either “red” or “blue,” how do you get to be bilingual? Dual Language bilingual education is growing in popularity throughout the United States, and for good reasons: it is a promising model for the development of bilingualism and academic competencies, it is inclusive, enriching, and exciting. Yet there are some contradictions between the ways in which language acquisition is perceived and carried out in dual language programs, i.e. primarily through monolingual instruction and strict separation policies between the “target” and “dominant” languages; and our emerging understandings of language/literacy acquisition and bilingual language practices. At the same time, research in recent years has complicated our understanding of language-in-education policy implementation: teachers, parents, and children all play central roles in determining how policy mandates play out in schools and classrooms. In this talk, I will introduce a unique context: a large urban district that has taken on the enormous and exciting challenge of shifting its largely subtractive transitional bilingual education programs toward a more additive, enriched model of bilingual education. Through the lens of one kindergarten classroom, we’ll look at what happens when teachers and children, with their own goals, investments and identities to negotiate, confront some of the on-the-ground complications of implementation of this district-wide dual language initiative. |
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Dr. Margarita Machado-Casas
Dr. Margarita Machado-Casas is an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio in the College of Education and Human Development, Division of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies. Dr. Machado-Casas completed her Ph.D. at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was awarded the IMPACT award for her research on transnational migration trends of newly arrived immigrants in the U.S. South and its effects in Education. Dr. Machado-Casas also completed the a prestigious Post-Doctoral fellowship at Frank Potter Graham (FPG) Research Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill.
For more information about Dr. Machado-Casas and her work, please click here. At the TexLER Conference she will be presenting on the following topic: Contra la marea/Against the Current: Pedagogies of immigrants and refugee families when navigating US schools Over the past two decades, an influx of immigrants and refugees has changed the face of US classrooms. In search of a better life for their children, immigrants and refugees have high aspirations and care greatly for their children’s education. Yet this is not what you hear from US educators and schools. Faculty and administrators raise concerns about working with refugee and immigrant families. Based on an eight-year longitudinal research investigation with refugee and immigrant families in three states in the US. This study looks at Comunidades Unidas Para la Educación/Communities United for Education (CUPE) a program that provides some insight on the unique perspectives of refugees and immigrant ELs and their families, attempts to equip families with the knowledge they need for their children to succeed in US school. Furthermore, it informs educators about the new faces in their classrooms and the challenges they face in and out of the classroom. This qualitative study, through individual and focus group interviews with refugee, and immigrant families chronicles and explores the challenges families face in the United States. Findings show that with needs-based school outreach programs are imperative for students and parents alike in order to expand our understanding of these new perspectives and provide more opportunities for these diverse voices to be heard in an effort to more equitably serve their varied educational needs. |