Community Literacies en Confianza : Learning from Bilingual after-School Programs. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Community Literacies en Confianza : Learning from Bilingual after-School Programs

Most teachers of English language learners are not fluently bilingual, and many don’t receive formal professional development in teaching emergent bilingual students. 

Thus, they aren’t always adequately prepared to meet the challenges of working with this growing demographic of K–12 students in US classrooms. So teachers’ greatest resources, argues Steven Alvarez, are the students themselves, with both a facility in their home language and ties to their home communities. After-school programs focused on English learners, Alvarez suggests, offer a way for parents, teachers, and volunteers to come together to navigate school systems and the English language, share stories, and work to develop facility in reading and writing across languages. 

Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs directly addresses teachers who are learning about emergent bilingual students. Alvarez offers ideas for approaching, engaging, and partnering with students’ communities to design culturally sustaining pedagogies that productively use the literacy abilities students bring to schools. Drawing on the NCTE Position Paper on the Role of English Teachers in Educating English Language Learners (ELLs), Alvarez highlights the importance of building mutual trust, or confianza, between students, schools, and communities, both inside and outside of the classroom. Our students have as much to teach us as we have to teach them, as long as we’re open to their experiences and stories as we learn and grow together.

Steven Alvarez earned his Ph.D. at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Previous to arriving at St. John's, he was Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. He specializes in literacy studies and bilingual education with a focus on Mexican immigrant communities. Dr. Alvarez teaches courses ranging from autobiographical writing, ethnographic methods, visual rhetoric, and "taco literacy," a course exploring the foodways of Mexican immigrants in the United States.

Dr. Alvarez is the author of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (State University of New York Press) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English). Dr. Alvarez is also the author of three books of poetry. His book The Codex Mojaodicus was the winner of the 2016 Fence Modern Poets Prize.