What Are We Reading?

Ready to be inspired and empowered? Check out the two thought-provoking books authored by Dr. Deb Palmer, a renowned faculty member in the BUENO Equity, Bilingualism and Biliteracy department.

• Critical Consciousness in Dual Language bilingual Education: Case Studies on Policy and Practice

This book features case studies that address dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, which offer content instruction in two languages to help youth develop fluent bilingualism/biliteracy, high academic achievement, and sociocultural competence. While increasingly popular, the DLBE model is a framework that comes with unique hurdles and challenges.

Applying a pioneering critical consciousness approach, the volume provides readers with narratives, awareness, and tools to support culturally and linguistically diverse students and their families. Organized around four major areas—policy, leadership, family and community engagement, teaching and teacher learning—the volume’s case studies bring together stories from policymakers, educational leaders, family and community members, and teachers. The case studies spotlight examples in which power imbalances have been identified and shifted through critically conscious actions and offer insight into how to ensure all DLBE programs are nurturing, empowering, multilingual environments for all students, particularly racialized, immigrant, and transnational students. Accessible and varied, the case studies address important topics such as anti-Black racism, digital access, disability, school-district relations, working with undocumented families, and more. Each chapter includes a case narrative, teaching notes, discussion questions, and/or teaching activities to support stakeholders who wish to develop and enact equity in their DLBE policies, classrooms, and professional development.

A key resource for supporting student needs and transformative inquiry in the classroom, this book is ideal for graduate students, professors, leaders, educators, and other stakeholders in bilingual education and language education.

• Gentrification and Bilingual Education: A Texas Two-Way Bilingual School Across Seven Years

This unique volume brings together findings from six separate but interconnected studies, carried out over seven years in the same small bilingual elementary school. During a period of rapid gentrification in Austin, Texas, Hillside Elementary transformed from a predominantly Latinx, under-resourced and under-enrolled neighborhood school with a transitional bilingual program to a two-way dual language bilingual education (TWBE) school with a waiting list of middle-class families from across the school district. Chapter authors entered the context as researchers at various points along the timeline, with varied theoretical lenses, research questions, and methodological approaches. Most authors have also been parents or teachers at the school, and all were deeply invested in the school community and the education of bilingual students. They come together to argue that in order for a TWBE school to serve marginalized bilingual and BIPOC children and families, it must work collectively toward critical consciousness. Educators, parents, and students must learn to center the cultural, linguistic and racial/ethnic identities of marginalized families, and engage in ongoing dialogue at every level. The culminating product is a theme with variations: one context, one phenomenon, multiple varied positionalities and perspectives.