ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents Community Middle and High, describing the nested contexts of the local neighborhood, as well as state and district-level policies for educating emergent bilinguals. It discusses the author’s positionality, as well as the author’s seven-year research relationship with three ESL teachers. Instead of a single project, the collaborative research relationship was made up of and sustained by multiple practitioner inquiry projects. The chapter highlights a unique dimension of the book, which is its positioning of ESL teachers as researchers of critical pedagogies, not just designers or implementers. Finally, the chapter offers portraits of seven emergent bilingual youth who appear frequently throughout the book.
