Amplifying Newcomer and Emergent Plurilingual Students’ Voice, Agency and Authority through Enactments of Authentic Cariño

Abstract

U.S. educational systems routinely dismiss and discount the voices of newcomer and emergent plurilingual students, and instead privilege ideologies of whiteness, ability, and English monolingualism. In this paper, we use a case study from a month-long arts- and literacy-rich summer program in Southern California to examine how three educators’ enactment of authentic cariño led them to disrupt culturally and linguistically subtractive practices and co-create educational processes that honor and amplify newcomer students’ voices, agency, and authority. After examining ideological, curricular and pedagogical elements of their approach, we focus on implications for our collective efforts to re-imagine schooling as a radically inclusive space that unapologetically supports and sustains the voices, agency, and humanity of newcomer and emergent plurilingual students and communities.

Disclosure Statement

We have no known conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1 We use the term plurilingual, instead of terms such as English learner or bi/multilingual, to emphasize the holistic, fluid, and interconnected nature of linguistic and cultural repertoires (see Dover & Rodríguez-Valls, 2022; Council of Europe, 2001; Marshall & Moore, 2018).

2 District and teacher names have been changed.

3 “We had the opportunity to play with the different languages as every day the classes were ‘happy’ and sometimes a little (boring).”

4 “It was not an easy task to cross that river… it was not easy to leave our parents behind when we still needed them, it was not easy to be in an asylum where the common practice to separate you from your love ones, it was not easy to walk through the desert aware of all its dangers, it was not easy to forget that everything was a traumatic experience.”