With the U.S. government’s restrictions on immigration from Mexico and Central America and the increased anti-immigrant sentiments, the lives of immigrant families have been greatly impacted by strict borderlands politics, militarized police at the border zones, family separations, and fear tactics. As a result, providing adequate educational and sociopolitical support for immigrant students can be challenging.
Using participatory action research and design-based methodology, this professional development workshop will focus on the question: How do we adequately prepare teachers to work with multilingual learners and engage in advocacy praxis with immigrant families and communities in the current political climate?
The outcomes of this professional development workshop will be:
- To advance a critical-ecological perspective on language, literacy, teaching, and learning.
- To promote an asset-based orientation toward multilingualism and cultural pluralism in the classroom and society.
- To establish and sustain strong partnerships between university, community organizations, schools, and immigrant families’ households.
- To envision and enact new contexts for advocacy action, new forms of family and community engagement, and new circulations of languages and literacies across households, classrooms, and communities.
