BEIS Newsletter - March 2015 (Plain Text Version)
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ABOUT THIS ISSUE
We would like to welcome the reader to the new issue of the newsletter of the Bilingual Education Interest Section (BEIS). Last year, BEIS celebrated its 40th anniversary, which prompted the topic for the current newsletter: the past, present, and future of bilingual education. For this special issue, we decided to interview established scholars, activists, and administrators who have made a significant contribution to the development and growth of the field. As such we hereby offer interviews with Wayne Wright, Sonia Nieto, David Rogers, Kate Menken, and Ofelia García. Each of them has a unique and inspiring journey to bilingual education, at times personal and at times professional, driven by natural curiosity, local circumstances, diverse experiences, and the desire to provide best education for their students. Their stories shed light on the field as a whole as they take us back into a time when they were students and teachers themselves to then bring us back again to current times. Each of these journeys highlights important implications for what lies ahead for advocates of bilingual education. As the interviews organically evolved, the order of their answers and type of follow-up questions vary, yet they provide a broad spectrum of meaningful comments which may further enrich readers’ knowledge about the scholars and the field. Without further ado, we invite you to take on this personally moving, intellectually stimulating, and professionally enriching journey into the lives of those who have lived and/or studied the origins of bilingual education and continue to work relentlessly toward the betterment of the field. Andrés Ramírez is assistant professor of TESOL and bilingual education at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Ratón, USA. His research focuses on the academic achievement of emergent to advanced bilinguals in K–16 contexts. Alsu Gilmetdinova is a PhD candidate in the Literacy and Language Education Program at Purdue University. Her interests revolve around bilingual education, language policy, and TESOL. |
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