Polar Bears on Mission Street
San Francisco fourth graders learn about global warming and take action to save the polar bears.
English Language Learners
Language Lessons
Using native Spanish speakers to instruct their classmates in more than just verbs and pronunciation.
‘Is This Just Regular English?’
They were in their seats before the bell rang: 28 spit-polished 10th graders waiting silently in their chairs. In my four years of teaching, I had never encountered a room […]
Testing Lang
Lang was a student of mine last year, an eight-year-old with big brown eyes and a shy, quiet nature. He hated writing; putting pencil to paper was a brutal task […]
Welcoming Kalenna
When I was a child, our home was filled with the sounds of Spanish, mariachi music, and boisterous conversations. At home, my Nana cooked enchiladas, menudo, and tamales. During family celebrations we broke piñatas, danced, and […]
Strawberry Fields Forever?
When I was a child, my mother couldn’t help us with our homework. She had gone to work as a maid in a Mexican hacienda at age 11 and hadn’t learned to […]
Lessons from a Garden Spider
An ordinary spider assists a multilingual third-grade classroom.
Honor Their Names
Students’ names are the first thing teachers know about the young people who enter our classrooms; they can signal country of origin, gender, language. Students’ names provide the first moment when a teacher can demonstrate their warmth and humanity, their commitment to seeing and welcoming students’ languages and cultures into the classroom.
My First Year as a Teacher of Color
A teacher of color writes about obstacles he faced during his first year in the classroom and the support he received — and did not receive — from other teachers and administrators.
The Struggle for Bilingual Education
Organizer and advocate Tony Báez has been fighting for improved bilingual education programs for decades. In this interview, he talks about the current state of bilingual education and describes how parents and educators won a maintenance K-12 bilingual program in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Language Is a Human Right
Educator Debbie Wei, co-founder of a folk arts-based school in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, describes her journey—from growing up as the child of Chinese immigrants who never spoke to her in their native language, to advocating for heritage language programs.
English-Only to the Core
Is the Common Core better than current approaches to English language learners—or the next salvo in more than a decade of attacks on bilingual programs?
Rethinking Bilingual Education
Rethinking Bilingual Education is an exciting new collection of articles about bringing students’ home languages into our classrooms. How do we bring social justice curriculum into our bilingual classrooms? How […]