What I Wrote in 2024
I published a lot during the first six months of this year. Here are some highlights.
First Book
In June, a book project my coworker Dr. Antione Tomlin and I had worked on since May 2022 came to fruition. When We Hear Them: Attuning Teachers to Language-Diverse Students contains eighteen chapters plus a foreword by UPenn educational linguistics prof Nelson Flores, my introduction, and a coda by one of my former students. The chapters are written by scholar-practitioners in the U.S., Chile, China, Austria, Spain, and Pakistan. Some of the authors are tenured faculty at research universities, while others work at community colleges, high schools, or are grad students. It was a lot of work, but very rewarding. Our goal is for the book to be accessible to as many educators as possible, so please ask your local or institutional library to bring in a copy.
First Peer Reviewed Journal Article
Another big first was the publication of an article I co-authored with coworkers and collaborators Jessenia McCrary Linares, Tema Encarnación, and Dr. Audra Butler in New Directions for Community Colleges. “Dual enrollment and multilingual English learners: From equity gaps toward solutions” evolved out of a white paper I wrote in the first research methods class of my doctorate of education (Ed.D.) program at University of Virginia (UVA) in fall 2022. It’s based on a summer program Tema and I started over three years ago with our Anne Arundel Community College and Anne Arundel County Public Schools colleagues for multilingual English learners in high school to take college classes before they graduate. Action research and applied scholarship is what the Ed.D. is all about, so it was fulfilling to put those priorities into practice, and into print. Thanks to the publisher’s partnership with UVA, the article is open access (no paywall).
Advocacy and Reflection
I co-authored two articles related to my work to pass a state law this year. The Credit for All Language Learning (CALL) Act requires Maryland community colleges to award college credit for English Language Learning/English for Speakers of Other Languages courses. These credits will be counted as World Languages and/or Humanities. It also requires public universities in the state to accept these credits when students transfer. Our work to fully implement the law will continue in 2025, but I’m hopeful it will become a model for states across the country.
The first article, “The value of being multilingual on the Shore,” is co-authored with Washington College prof. Dr. Elena Deanda. It was published in The Chestertown Spy (and sister site The Talbot Spy), which was strategic because the Eastern Shore of Maryland has a growing immigrant population but tends to be more socially and politically conservative. The placement of this op-ed, and outreach to educators across the Shore, played a role in all delegates and state senators from the Eastern Shore voting for the bill.
The second article, “Uniting around out students’ call for language justice: Equal credit for equal work,” appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of MDTESOL Quarterly. It was coauthored with the core team that led our coalition’s efforts to pass the bill: Sarah Barnhardt, Lama Masri, Ray Gonzales, and Amelia Yongue. In it, we reflect on key actions that led to our success. (Email me or comment here if you’d like me to send you a copy of this article.)
Grounded Theory
One of the best parts of editing a book is building relationships for future collaboration. When We Hear Them chapter author Sam Harris and I expanded on a letter to the editor of EdWeek we wrote last year in a Language Magazine article which came out online and in print in April. “Deconstructing English learner labels, constructing multilingual schools” came out of a chapter set aside from Sam’s Ph.D. dissertation. In it, we provide some guidelines on how to assess the ever-changing alphabet soup of labels for language minoritized students in U.S. schools, and forcefully question whether these labels would even be needed if we transformed schools into truly multilingual learning environments.
Medium
This year on Medium, I wrote 10 articles, one poem, and published two guest articles by my students. Most of the articles were about higher education funding or policy, but I also wrote a theoretical piece on social movement structure. Thanks for reading!
