A Sense of Belonging

This project explores how critical consciousness in DLBE (bi)literacy classrooms can make space for reclaiming Latinx student voice and agency, fostering a sense of belonging. Carmela and Rosalyn, a bilingual teacher and a university researcher, reflect on an ethnographic case study in Carmela’s first grade two-way DL classroom that investigated how Carmela re-envisioned a “traditional” monolingual writer’s workshop approach. Carmela reflects on how her writer’s workshop emerged from her students and their families feeling “extinguished,” visible in her first grade students asking her, “Miss, why does the President hate Mexicans?” In response to her students’ fears and questions, Carmela drew on critically conscious approaches to interrogate the use of writing prompts and scripted, banking literacy teaching methods to instead explicitly celebrate the languages and lives of her students and their families. In response, students enacted agency to tell their own stories across their entire repertoires of language and modality, and parents were invited as partners in the work of critically conscious writing in DLBE. This study illuminates the power of centering the voices Latinx and immigrant students in DL and offers guidelines for engaging emergent bilingual students and their parents in agentive and meaningful writing.