
Exploring Policies to Support EL Students
Exploring Policies to Support EL Students
While English learner (EL) classification is designed to protect and ensure the rights of students learning English to equal educational opportunity, far too often the EL label is associated with stigma and access barriers. At the secondary level, these barriers, often in the form of academic tracking, can have high-stakes consequences for students’ high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment. In this talk, Dr. Ilana Umansky will present recent and ongoing work conducted through the National Research and Development Center to Improve the Education of Secondary English Learners. Designed and conducted in partnership with state education agencies, this work tackles critical questions including: To what extent are EL-classified students in middle and high school excluded from accessing core curricular content? What are the implications of curricular exclusion on students’ graduation outcomes? And what are school systems doing to remedy constrained curricular access? Drawing on statewide data from partner states, and examining largescale trends over time, Umansky will detail malleable levers to support course access, including the prevalence and effects of providing extra instructional time to EL-classified students.
Speaker Bio
Ilana Umansky is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. Her work explores how education policy impacts the educational opportunities and outcomes of immigrant, multilingual and English learner-classified students often using largescale data and longitudinal and quasi-experimental methods. She holds a PhD from Stanford University in Sociology of Education and is particularly interested in topics such as labeling, tracking, and language policy as she focuses on partnership-centered research to support equitable school systems for immigrant and multilingual students. Her work appears in journals including the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Educational Policy, and Exceptional Children. Her work has received funding and awards from institutions including the Institute of Education Sciences, AERA’s Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group, the Jacobs Foundation, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation.
RSVP to secure your lunch!

Book Talk: How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America
Book Talk, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America
Book Talk Summary
Dr. Laura Chávez-Moreno examines the pivotal role schools play in shaping concepts of race and racial categories. Drawing from her research in a diverse Spanish-English bilingual education program, she highlights how teachers and students grapple with conflicting ideas about race and the Latinx group. She argues that the bilingual program advanced an imagined Spanish as the signature boundary delineating the Latinx racialized group in relation to other racialized groups. She invites educators to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race, an approach that considers racialization and recognizes Latinx as a racialized group. Her work underscores why this shift is necessary: how we teach about race influences whether schools can provide an education that challenges racist ideologies.
Speaker Bio
Laura Chávez-Moreno is an award-winning researcher, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and Department of Education.
RSVP link for the lunch: Sign-Up Form.

Book Talk with Dr. Inmaculada García-Sánchez
Language, whether spoken, written, or signed, is a powerful resource that isused to facilitate social justice or undermine it. The first reference resource to use an explicitly global lens to explore the interface between language and social justice, this volume expands our understanding of how language symbolizes, frames, and expresses political, economic, and psychic problems in society, thus contributing to visions for social justice.

Guest Lecture with Dr. Ariana Mangual Figueroa
Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School
Talk Summary
Revealing the complex ways young people understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives, Ariana Mangual Figueroa observes when and how six Latina students from mixed-immigration-status families choose to talk about citizenship. She models new ways to collaborate with educators, children, and families, ultimately offering a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom. Click here to register!
Speaker Bio
Ariana Mangual Figueroa draws from language socialization and linguistic anthropology to examine language use and learning in Latinx communities in the United States. Her ethnographic research seeks to understand how the lives of children and adults in mixed-status families are shaped by citizenship status and schooling practices during everyday, routine interactions. Her work has appeared in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Language Policy, and the American Educational Research Journal. She is currently a co-principal Investigator of two longitudinal research projects: the first is called the "Putting Immigration and Education into Conversation Everyday" (PIECE) Research Project funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation, and the second is the City University of New York-Initiative on Immigration and Education (CUNY-IIE, see http://www.cuny-iie.org). Before obtaining her Ph.D., she taught English as a Second Language and Spanish in the Bronx and Brooklyn public schools.

Fall Writing Social
Come and join us for some structured writing time. Connect with other students and faculty while we support each other and write in community.
Register here: https://forms.gle/FuKTrDvdPyfNaZ6y8

Exploring Equity and Methodological Advancements to Transform Academic Discourse Teaching and Research Conference
Two days of papers and commentary bringing together researchers and practitioners across the prek-16+ educational spectrum with a range of epistemologies and methodological approaches to address social, linguistic, and racial equity and the “gate-keeping” role of language as it functions in classrooms and academic accountability testing.

Graduate Hour & Guest Lecture with Dr. Jonathan Rosas
Graduate Hour & Guest Lecture with Jonathan Rosa, Ph.D. A co-sponsored talk by the Anthropology Department Discourse Lab and the Language, Literacy, and Learning Collaborative (LLLC) in the School of Education and Information Studies.
Jonathan Rosa is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Dr. Rosa is also the Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Global Ethnography. His research examines the co-naturalization of language and race as critical features of modern governance. Specifically, he tracks colonially structured interrelations among racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and institutional inequity. Dr. Rosa collaborates with local communities to investigate these phenomena, develop tools for understanding, and challenge the forms of disparity to which they correspond.

Graduate Hour & Guest Lecture with Dr. Cati de los Ríos
"Musicxs, Corridistas, Folkloristas: Learning from Youth Expressive Practitioners of the Everyday"
Cati V. de los Ríos, Associate Professor of Adolescent Literacy and Bi/Multilingual Education
Anthropologists and folklorists have long contended that expressive culture—including sermons, blues, poetry, music, dance, art, theatre, among others—can provide an analytic that allows for dynamic investigation into the style and expression of people’s everyday lives (Hurston, 1935; Limón, 2012; Nájera-Ramírez, 1989; Paredes, 1958). Cultural expressivity indexes identities, space, and time, and can adorn the body with gestures and artifacts to tell important stories (Nájera-Ramírez et al., 2009). This talk focuses on the cultural expressivity and critical translingual literacy of bilingual and emergent bilingual youth who are critical consumers, readers, orators, writers and/or performers of Mexican Regional Music. Learning from the expressive practices of immigrant-origin bi/multilingual youth can point us to rich—and often invisibilized—moments of transnational and translingual literacy, language, and identity development.