B-MEIS Newsletter - December 2020 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
•  LETTER FROM THE CHAIR
•  LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
ARTICLES
•  CRITICAL LANGUAGE INQUIRY: TOWARD ANTIRACIST AND DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGIES
•  THE VALUE OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL COMPETENCIES IN SERVING IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE COMMUNITIES
•  BEYOND MONOLINGUAL MYTHS TOWARD A MULTILINGUAL ENGLISH MEDIUM INSTRUCTION CLASSROOM
•  ADVOCATING FOR MULTILINGUAL STUDENTS IN A TIME OF CRISIS
•  HOW IMPORTANT ARE CROSS-LINGUISTIC SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN BILINGUAL ACQUISITION?
•  SHORTCOMINGS OF VALIDATING TRANSLANGUAGING WITHOUT PEDAGOGIC FOCUS IN BILINGUAL CLASSROOM
•  TRANSLANGUAGING AS A SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGY IN LITERACY PRACTICE
•  HERITAGE LANGUAGE PARENT EMPOWERMENT IN THE TIME OF COVID
•  MIXING TOGETHER LIKE A FRUIT SALAD: MAINTAINING IDENTITY IN A DIGITAL AND GLOCAL WORLD
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
•  CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS

LEADERSHIP UPDATES

LETTER FROM THE CHAIR

Ching-Ching Lin, Touro College, New York, USA

Dear B-MEIS Newsletter Readers,

As the current chair of the Bilingual-Multilingual Education Interest Section (B-MEIS), it is my pleasure and honor to introduce you to the fall 2020 issue of the B-MEIS newsletter. The year 2020 will be forever remembered as the time in history where a series of powerful events converged, engulfing us in a perfect storm: economic disruption, political upheaval, and social strife unfolding across the world, ripping communities apart, and shattering our complacency of human progress. Our lives, together with our sense of normalcy, have been disrupted and impacted in unprecedented ways. Above all, the shift to remote learning has led to revolutionary changes in education.

For one thing, the COVID-19 has profoundly impacted the way we teach and learn­­­—for better or worse. As we continue to brace for a tough time ahead, we may want to seize the moment to examine our practices in light of new insights afforded by the current crisis. Hence, the B-MEIS editorial team have chosen “Glocalized Approaches to Multilingual Education” as a theme/lens to re-theorize the role of bi/multilingual education in transforming reified social reality. As a theoretical construct, glocalization describes how people relate linguistically, culturally and socially to one another and to the social milieu they inhabit in times of change. Particularly glocalization can help us grapple with the paradox of the co-existence of linguistic diversity and the dominance of English by seeing the world as a multi-dimensional and at times contradictory phenomenon. From several examples gleaned from this issue, while social media platforms have transformed social connections around the world during the COVID-19 and strengthened the dominance of English, quarantine and social isolation provided children from minoritized communities the chance to reconnect with their heritage cultures. As memories, histories, and survival strategies are often coded in language, highlighting bilingual children's creative and strategic translingual practices and making sense of family language policies serve as a springboard for advocacy, empowerment, and transformation.

Seeing the development in bi/multilingual education from a glocal perspective may also help us build a better understanding of how language-based discrimination intersects with other forms of discrimination. As many authors in this issue reminded us, colonialism and imperialism remain a continuing reality. To a large degree, the fight for bi/multilingual education we are still waging today is part of lingering cultural imperialism and colonial legacies that we must reckon with in order to create a just and equitable future. Since language influences the way we see and interpret the world, it is our duty as teachers to expose language ideologies and reinstate classroom instruction as a site of struggle and weapon for social change.

I would like to thank all the participating authors for their excellent contributions to a more nuanced understanding of the recurrent challenges in the development of bi/multilingual education. I would also like to invite each of you to step into conversations about the related topics with us in a collective effort to move toward institutional change.

Last but not least, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincerest appreciation for the whole ensemble of the B-MEIS leadership team whose unselfish acts and dedication inspired and continue to inspire me:

Chair-Elect: Clara Bauler

Past Chair: Alsu Gilmetdinova

Editors: Kirti Kapur, Matthew Nall and Islam M. Farag

Community Managers: Janie Thomas and Sunyung Song

Member-at-Large: Xin Chen and Zhongfeng Tian

Historians: Shuzhan Li and Laura Liu

Sincerely,

Ching-Ching Lin

Chair, B-MEIS (2020–2021)