ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Latinx youths’ leveraging of their plurilingual communicative repertoires to fulfill challenging responsibilities both at work and with family, highlighting their routine engagement in work that was cognitively and socially complex. The sophisticated linguistic and social skills mobilized by these high school students in informal and professional settings formed a knowledge base that contributed to program changes and critical professional development for the school staff and workplace supervisors. The authors first describe a student survey designed to shape their teachers’ understanding of the students’ responsibilities and talents outside of the classroom. Student responses revealed a strong deficit orientation among work supervisors in the program, a lack of asset-based understandings of plurilingualism among teachers. Building on the results of the survey, which revealed students’ abilities to handle much more complex tasks than they had been assigned to do in their work placements, the authors then involved youth research assistants and focus groups in educating not only the teachers but also the work-study supervisors. The chapter ends with suggestions for raising the visibility and status of youth’s plurilingual practices.
