Art as a Way of Talking for Emergent Bilingual Youth

This book features effective artistic practices to improve literacy and language skills for emergent bilinguals in PreK-12 schools. Including insights from key voices from the field, this book highlights how artistic practices can increase proficiency in emergent language learners and students with limited access to academic English. Challenging current prescriptions for teaching English to language learners, the arts-integrated framework in this book is grounded in a sense of student and teacher agency and offers key pedagogical tools to build upon students' sociocultural knowledge and improve language competence and confidence. Offering rich and diverse examples of using the arts as a way of talking, this volume invites teacher educators, teachers, artists, and researchers to reconsider how to fully engage students in their own learning and best use the resources within their own multilingual educational settings and communities.

Berta Rosa Berriz is an Instructor of Creative Arts and Learning at the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University, USA. Amanda Claudia Wager is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual/TESOL Education at the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University, USA. Vivian Maria Poey is an Associate Professor and Director of the M.Ed. in Art, Community and Education program at the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University, USA.

1. Introduction: Bienvenidos Section I: Walk the Talk: Breathing Life into Theories with Families, Schools, and Communities 2. Heritage Languages as a Valuable Asset for Multilingual Children in US Schools and Beyond: We Can't Afford to Lose Them! 3. Preparing Ideologically Clear Bilingual Teachers to Recognize Linguistic Geniuses 4. Inclusive Teaching for Bilingual and Multilingual Learners: Collage as Ornithology 5. Family Art Backpacks: Building Family-School Connections Through Art and Story Section II: In the Heights: Lifting Potential, Expanding Possibilities 6. Seen from Within: Photography, Culture, and Community in a Dual-Language School 7. Meeting the Needs of and Giving Voice to Linguistically Diverse Children through Multimodal and Arts-Based Assessments 8. Picturebook Illustrations: Powerful Pathways for Literacy Learning and Language Acquisition 9. Constructing Stories Using Language and Digital Art: Voices of Multilingual Learners Section III: Lift Every Voice: Democratic Practice Before, During, and After School 10. -Qué caja? What box?: Inclusivity, Assessment, and the Political Possibilities of Preschool Drama 11. Telling Stories of Challenge and Triumph: Emergent Bilinguals Claim the Curriculum through Spoken-Word Poetry, Hip Hop and Video 12. Storier Warriors: New Waves of Indigenous Survivance and Language Revitalization 13. Youth Voices from In and Out of the Classroom: Emergent Bilingual Learners, Graphic Novels, and Critical Multiliteracies Afterword by Wayne Au