ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we report on the development of a 3-week summer ESL program for fourth-eighth grade emergent bilingual learners that involved students in telling personal stories through three mediums: hip hop, poetry, and video. Students gathered around one central theme, “Stories of Challenge and Triumph” that centered the work, yet opened up many possibilities, as they selected their own stories of personal significance as their content. The program demonstrates how the priorities of pluralism, language learning, and academic growth can overlap with arts-infused curriculum design. Specifically, our work provides an illustrative snapshot that responds to the following question: “How can educators use the arts to create opportunities for emergent bilingual learners to expand their uses of language and grow in their academic skills as they claim their spaces within the school curriculum?” and further “What pedagogies and structural elements of the curriculum support this kind of engagement?” Our curricular model is presented in the three stages of an arts-infused language unit: “Launch,” “Design Work,” and “Culmination,” each of which included specific and compelling opportunities for students to develop artistic skills and language skills.
