A "Welcoming Refuge" for Emerging Bilinguals: Cultivating a Climate of Diversity in Suburbia

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Equity for Bilingual Students Through Criticality and Teacher Reflection (Table 17)

Abstract

Schools shape the tone for welcoming immigrant, refugee, and emerging bilingual (EB) students through their language and education policies, and educators treatment of the linguistically and culturally diverse students they encounter. In this article I utilize grounded theory analyses to deepen our understanding of how educators in a small, suburban school district develop a welcoming context of reception for their growing number of immigrant and refugee EB students in a politically conservative, mostly monolingual Midwestern state. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the right mix of local policy and human context of reception can enable educators to appropriate and enact language education policies such that they disrupt dominant anti-immigrant narratives and create a "welcoming refuge" for their EB students.

Author

• Lyndsie Marie Schultz, Washington University in St. Louis