ABSTRACT
This case study is situated in a Spanish immersion elementary school (SIES) serving K-5 students in a diverse Midwestern city. While SIES was designed primarily to teach Spanish to monolingual English speakers, the school has about 15% of students who speak languages other than English at home. Most of their parents are im/migrants from Spanish-speaking countries. SIES holds cultural events during the school year to encourage parents and guardians to participate in school activities and to engage with educators. While these events are well attended by most families, Ana, the school principal, has noticed that few Spanish-speaking parents attend the literacy-themed events. Ana has worked with community members to adopt many strategies and to encourage participation of immigrant families. Specifically, a Multilingual Family Literacy Project was planned and implemented with the goal of developing ?“family stories” in multiple languages through which the emergent bilingual SIES children and their diverse parents could develop biliteracy together. This case highlights both the successes and challenges Ana experienced in developing inclusive and multilingual family literacy events for immigrant families, in particular.
