Literacy & Learning
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11274/9561
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Browsing Literacy & Learning by Author "Babino, Alexandra"
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Item Critical, compelling, and linguistically scaffolded literature: Implementing text sets multilingually for social justice(Texas Association for Literacy Education (TALE), 2019) Babino, Alexandra; Araujo, Juan J.; Maxwell, Marie L.In most cases, the curriculum chosen for wide-use does not mirror or address the pressing needs of bi/multilingual learners, especially for those who are in middle and high school settings. In light of this and the increasingly negative national discourse surrounding minoritized students, our focusin this article is to offer in-service teachers a heuristic for compiling a multi-genre, multilingual text set to support bi/multilingual students’ positive identities and literacies practices. This text set is designed with the themes of identity and social justice in order to reflect the students’ struggle to fully participate in the American Dream. It also describes how teachers can purposely plan for linguistic support in students’ additional languages, language varieties, and English. Taken together, we believe that deeply exploring these compelling books from a critical perspective with linguistic scaffolds will allow teachers to foster robust multilingual literacy skills to address social justice in the classroom and beyond.Item Emergent bilinguals’ emerging identities in a dual language school(Texas Association for Bilingual Education, 2015) Babino, Alexandra; Stewart, Mary AmandaThe purpose of this study was to explore how emergent bilinguals’ emerging identities interact with their language attitudes and choices in various contexts to create their investment in English, Spanish, and bilingualism. Using a mixed method design, the researchers analyzed surveys and social networking maps of 63 Mexican-American, bilingual fifth-graders in a one-way dual language (DL) school and then the interviews of 10 of these students. Findings indicate that students’ identities and investments show a strong correlation to their language use and language of instruction. Specifically, students’ investment in their languages suggest that we might reconsider strict language separation in DL programs while overtly attending to students’ investment in the minority language, Spanish. Most significantly, the language we use formally and informally affects students’ attitudes toward that language. Thus, greater emphasis on developing bilingual investment is an indispensable goal of DL programs.Item Humanizing (multi)literacy teaching: a starter kit to renewed hope(National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, 2018) Babino, AlexandraAmidst standardized testing pressures, zero-tolerance discipline policies, and increasingly distressing news headlines, this article seeks to encourage teachers that want to be and feel more human in their work with students with practical, classroom tools. It’s a starter kit of sorts that has allowed the author to move beyond the inevitable institutional status quo and toward a renewed hope through “armed love” (Freire, 1998, p. 41). It begins with a brief exploration of humanizing literacy practices and continues with two deceptively simple but potentially transformative tools: naming students and expanding definitions of literacy.Item Moving toward culturally sustaining language instruction that resists white language supremacy(National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, 2020) Caldera, Altheria; Babino, AlexandraIn this manuscript, we argue that language is central to students’ cultural identities and, therefore, should be validated in middle school classrooms. Additionally, we problematize the idea of “standard” languages and analyze how existing language hierarchies marginalize Students of Color through White language supremacy. White language supremacy can be defined as a belief in the superiority of Standard American English. In pedagogy, it manifests as teachers rejecting students’ preferred or home languages and dialects, forcing them to adopt the languaging practices of the dominant culture. Most importantly, we provide practical strategies for teachers who aim to enact culturally sustaining language instruction that resists White language supremacy.Item A pedagogy of care for adolescent English learners: A formative experiment(Tapestry, 2017) Stewart, Mary Amanda; Babino, Alexandra; Walker, KatieIn the case of educators of adolescents in the dynamic process of English acquisition, it is our goal to increase the fulfillment and success of the students we are privileged to serve through nurturing their academic, emotional, personal, social, and civic development. It is, therefore, essential that educators understand the implementation and impact of teaching through a framework of care.Item Striving toward equitable biliteracy assessments in hegemonic school contexts(The Association of Mexican American Educators, 2017) Babino, Alexandra; González-Carriedo, RicardoAmerican schools today display unprecedented levels of diversity in regard to the linguistic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds of their student population. Increasingly, more American students are also emergent bilingual learners. Despite this fact, most of the standardized assessments used by schools have been designed and normed for English monolingual students. The lack of specific assessments created for emergent bilinguals provides teachers and other stakeholders with only a partial and often inaccurate view of the students’ literacy growth as they develop proficiency in two languages. In this theoretical article, the authors explore how three complex characteristics of emergent biliteracy development interact: bilingual language proficiency, domains of language use, and language dominance. Then, they describe how teachers and school district leaders can begin to create more equitable assessment practices that are more closely aligned with the unique characteristics of biliteracy development amidst largely hegemonic, monolingual school systems.Item Teacher educators engage preservice teachers with The 57 Bus(Worlds of Words: Center for Global Literacies and Literatures (University of Arizona), 2019) Morton, Tami; Babino, AlexandraThe 57 Bus is an intriguing nonfiction story in which Dashka Slater uses her journalistic style to chronicle the explosive encounter of two high-school teenagers on the 57 bus. One teenager, Sasha, is White and from a middle-class neighborhood. Sasha, wearing a skirt, identifies as agender, rather than as either male or female. Richard is an African-American teen from a low socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhood. The book details the harrowing accounts of each student’s life prior to and after an eight-second timeframe that changed their lives forever—when Richard lights Sasha’s skirt on fire. This book explores the points of view of two students who have been traditionally marginalized in today’s schools, namely LGBTQIA, African-Americans, and those from low SES neighborhoods. By doing so, this book portrays the multidimensional lived experiences of actual students related to controversial topics like sexual and gender identity, equal housing, equitable education, and justice under the law. The book thus has the potential to counter the dominant narratives of mainstream culture by highlighting the nuanced complexity between individual “choices” and consequences that ripple across a lifetime.