Dear B-MEIS Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the whole world upside down, socially, economically and politically. As the pandemic uncovered, exacerbated, and challenged flawed social structures and enduring racial hierarchy, it has also opened up opportunities for us to engage in constructive dialogue and meaningful action to advance social justice. Reflecting on the role language plays in responding to cultural and linguistic diversity, we tapped into multilingual education as a resource for pushing empathy, building heritages and pursuing equitable courses of action. Multilingualism has always been a site of political struggle of entangling identities, conflicting ideologies and competitive community engagement. Hence, within the B-MEIS leadership, we have made it as our goal to explore diverse ways of constructing criticality as communities of practice in the field of multilingual education and beyond.

Fortunately, we are not alone in thinking this way. Through 2020, we have witnessed critical movements developing across academia that sought to amplify the impacts of Black Lives Matter on social justice. Joining forces with many of our affiliates and like-minded friends around the world, we worked to articulate shared accountabilities while mobilizing transformative community engagement regarding prioritizing equity. We hope all the activities we have planned can be leveraged to foster a shared vision of diversity, inclusion and equity. I would like to use this opportunity to share the B-MEIS highlights of 2020 with you:

Launching and hosting B-MEIS Monthly Webinar

• July: Designing for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Exploring Alternative Curriculum Models in Bilingual Education and Beyond
• August: Do Black Lives Matter in Bilingual Education?
• September: Envisioning TESOL through a Translanguaging Lens
• October: Fostering Home School Connections: When TESOL Professionals Double up as Parents of Multilingual Children
• December: Hip-Hop and Translanguaging: Negotiated Community Participation
• January: Multilingualism, Social Justice and Intercultural Competence in the Remote World of Virtual Exchange
• February: Cultivating Bilingual Education Leaders: Tensions, Successes and Lessons learned at graduate School Level

Planning and Publishing B-MEIS Newsletters

• Fall 2020: Glocalized Approaches to Multilingual Education (published in December)
• Spring 2021: Online Schooling and Translanguaging (this current issue)
• Spring 2021 Special Issue: Multilingual Learner Lesson Plan Design, Reflection, & Philosophies. Deadline for Submissions: March 15, 2021

Mission Statement Refresh: we revised the IS’s mission statement to reflect and demonstrate its commitment to multilingualism as a tool to advance and promote justice, equity and diversity. We invited the public to comment on a draft mission statement before finalizing it:

• Support: The purpose of the Bilingual-Multilingual Interest Section (B-MEIS) is to support and promote all multilingual learners' linguistic repertoires and multiliteracy skills as fundamental to the acquisition of a second or additional language.
• Elevate: The IS believes that additive and dynamic approaches must be endorsed and implemented in educational institutions in the interests of students from diverse backgrounds.
• Sustain: The IS supports the opportunity and right of all individuals to develop, construct and maintain a diverse range of cultural, linguistic, and literate repertoires of practice.
• Transform: The IS works to foster collaborative relations of power and address inequitable power relations in society and empower minority students to use their own repertoires of practice.

Collaborating and Organizing three Interest Section Sessions with other Interest Section at the upcoming Virtual TESOL 2021 Convention

• B-MEIS Academic Session: “Centering and Normalizing Diversity and Equity in Multilingual Education”, 25 March at 3:00 AM (EST).
• B-MEIS/EFL Intersection Session: “A Glocal Framework for Literacy Curriculum in EFL/Multilingual Classrooms”, 27 March at 3:00:00 PM.
• NNEST/SLW/B-MEIS Intersection Session: “Affirming Multifaceted Identities in TESOL", 25 March at 6:00 AM (EST).

Increasing the B-MEIS social media presence

• B-MEIS Facebook Group and Twitter

Planning all the above activities could not have been done without the collaborative and continuous efforts on the part of our dedicated, hardworking colleagues within the B-MEIS leadership who I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to:

Chair: @Ching-Ching Lin
Chair-Elect: @Clara Bauler
Chair-Elect-Elect: @Zhongfreng Tian
Past Chair: @Alsu Gilmetdinova
Editors: @Kirti Kapur, @Matthew Nall, @Islam Farag, and @Huseyin Uysal
Community Managers: @Janie Thomas and @Sunyung Song
Member-at-Large: @Xin Chen and @Zhongfeng Tian
Historians: @Shuzhan Li and @Laura Liu

As many countries have become a more culturally and ethnically diverse nation, where the multilingual backgrounds of students are often foreign to the teacher, language education must reckon with the reality of structural inequity and shift toward a more critical stance against unequal power.

We would like to continue strengthening our commitment to critical approaches to multilingualism as an agency of global justice by inviting you to join our leadership team. B-MEIS looks forward to working with you to develop an even more robust collaborative network in and around the B-MEIS community.

Stay Safe and Healthy!

Sincerely,

Ching-Ching Lin (B-MEIS Chair 2020-2021)