EDML 416: Foundations of Bilingual Education
Course Activity: Where I’m from
At the beginning of the semester, to illustrate the diversity (mutuality and difference) in our community and as an analogy to the larger society, I model an activity titled “Where I’m From” derived from George Ella Lyon. We all have our own story to tell. This poem helps zoom in on the specifics of that story and allows exploration of background, home, childhood, upbringing and family culture. Subsequently, the CI students create their own version using the poem as the prompt to describe their unique lives, i.e., families, cultural traditions, socio-emotional activities, and favorite things (sports, foods, films). Each week, two students share their projects to reveal the diversity in our shared space.
EDML 417: The Socio-Cultural Context of Bilingual Schooling
Course Assignment: Linguistic landscape de mi comunidad
For this assignment, CI students explore the diverse linguistic and communicative practices of their local communities. As they craft this project, they consider these two primary questions: What is the linguistic landscape of your community? How are the communicative practices of the comunidad represented visually throughout your neighborhood (e.g., shops, signs, schools, other spaces)? Students walk their communities and observe the sounds and visual representations of the linguistic landscape. They share their observations and learnings through a medium of their choice and the presentations must include the community's demographics, reflections and learnings, and implications for teaching.
EDUC 445: Chicano Child and Adolescent
Course Assignment: Middle School Book Club
In the course, CI students facilitate a middle school book club with participating students in a local school, a service-learning project that promotes the literacy growth, critical thinking, and mentorship of middle school students. The community-based experience and assignment provides CI students with interesting, timely and culturally relevant interactions in our diverse Latino communities. These community interactions provide opportunity for CI students to explore the issues, cultural practices, and social experiences of Latinx communities and to better understand the themes of the course: La Inmigración; La Familia; La Religion; La Educación; La Salud; Las Celebraciones; and La Cosecha.
EDML 563: Primary Language Schooling in the US, Grades K-12 I
Course Assignment: Biliteracy
For this signature assignment, students create a literacy unit composed of three lessons for developing biliteracy skills with special attention to skills involved in the transferability to English. This unit will focus on a specific skill set called Bridging, bringing the two languages together, guiding students to engage in contrastive analysis of the two languages, and to transfer the academic content they have learned from one language to the other language. In this assignment, primary language usage is recognized and affirmed to increase equity among the development of students’ literacy skills and multilingual practices.
EDML 564: Primary Language Schooling in the US, Grades K-12 II
Course Assignment: Autobiographical Literacy, Language, & Culture Story
Early in the semester, students are asked to reflect on their language/literacy development and connections to their diverse identities and cultures. Students create a presentation of their personal history and relationship with language, literacy, and culture. Presentations take a variety of artistic forms, including spoken word poetry, monologues, and narrated videos. Some questions students consider are: Where do you come from in a sociocultural linguistic sense? What have been your experiences with language and literacy in school/home? In this assignment, students use metacognition to understand the value and impact of their cultural communities and primary language in developing their own literacy identities.