Biliteracy, Transnationalism, Multimodality, and Identity: Trajectories Across Time and Space

Herein, we are privileged to be given a close and detailed look at the lives and literacies of transnational multilingual youth and adults of diverse origins and communities from across the United States. These are multilingual lives and literacies located on the west coast, or in western mountain, southwest, midwest, or northeast U.S. There are New Yorkers of Dominican, Colombian, Bengali, and Chabad Jewish-American heritage, Mexican immigrants from Guanajuato and Jalisco in Iowa and California, respectively, and adult women refugees from Bosnia, Iran, and Sudan now residing in the intermountain west

The Continua of Biliteracy and the Bilingual Educator: Educational Linguistics in Practice

The continua model of biliteracy offers a framework in which to situate research, teaching, and language planning in linguistically diverse settings; bilingual teacher education represents a conjunction of all three of these and hence, a good candidate for applying the continua model. This paper uses selected experiences in language teacher education as practised at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education to illustrate the potential of the continua model as heuristic in continually (re)writing the bilingual or language educator\u27s knowledge base in response to the demands of educational policy and practice. A series of vignettes serves as a means for exploring dilemmas confronting bilingual (and language) educators and ways in which the continua model might shape a response: the global/local dilemma – global social, cultural, and political trends as contexts for biliteracy; the standard/nonstandard dilemma – media of biliteracy as reflected in evolving views of language and literacy in the world; the language/content dilemma – enquirybased teacher education as an approach to the development of biliteracy; and the language/culture/identity dilemma – teachers\u27 and learners\u27 identities and cultures as they relate to biliteracy content. The paper concludes with a few comments on bilingual educators as researchers, teachers, and language planners and on the need, now more than ever, for bilingual educators to be advocates

Hymes\u27s Linguistics and Ethnography in Education

Education is one of the arenas in which Hymes has brought his scholarship and politics of advocacy to bear in the world, perhaps most visibly through his University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education deanship (1975–1987), but also through the scope and depth of his writings on linguistics and ethnography in education. Language inequality is an enduring theme of Hymes\u27s work, in relation not only to Native American ethnopoetics, narrative analysis, and linguistic socialization, but also to educational linguistics and ethnography in education. Hymes proposed a vision and a set of ways of doing educational linguistics and ethnography in education—from ethnographic monitoring and ethnography of communication to ethnopoetics of oral narrative and ethnography of language policy—that have inspired and informed researchers for a generation and more

On not Taking Language Inequality for Granted: Hymesian Traces in Ethnographic Monitoring of South Africa’s Multilingual Language Policy

South African higher education is at a critical juncture in the implementation of South Africa’s multilingual language policy promoting institutional status for nine African languages, English, and Afrikaans. South African scholars, not content merely to comment from the sidelines on the policy, its promise, and challenges, have also engaged in implementation efforts. This article explores two such initiatives, both focusing on the use of African languages in higher education institutions where English is already established as the medium of instruction, and both undertaken with explicit goals of righting South Africa’s longstanding social injustices. I collaborated with colleagues at the University of Limpopo and the University of KwaZulu-Natal to assess current implementation and identify next steps and strategies for achieving truly multilingual teaching, learning, and research at their institutions. Taking up Hymes’ (1980) call for ethnographic monitoring of bilingual education, I sought in each case to jointly describe and analyze current communicative conduct, uncover emergent patterns and meanings in program implementation, and evaluate program and policy in terms of social meanings. I argue that ethnographic monitoring in education offers one means toward not taking language inequality for granted

“Until I Became a Professional, I Was Not, Consciously, Indigenous”: One Intercultural Bilingual Educator’s Trajectory in Indigenous Language Revitalization

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator’s trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language revitalization across urban, periurban, and rural spaces. Neri Mamani grew up in highland Peru and at the time I met her in 2005 was a bilingual intercultural education practitioner enrolled in master’s studies at the Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB-Andes) at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Drawing from my ethnographic research at PROEIB that year, situated also within a broader context of my ethnographic research on bilingual education in the Andes across several decades and Neri’s life trajectory across those same decades, this paper analyzes her narrative as it emerged in a 4-hour interview with me. I argue that Neri and her peers’ recognizing, valorizing, and studying the multiple and mobile linguistic, cultural, and intercultural resources at play in their own and others’ professional practices around bilingual intercultural education enable them to co-construct an Indigenous identity that challenges deep-seated social inequalities in their Andean world