This essay explores a variety of ways California's English Learner (EL) Roadmap can be used as a tool to make significant and transformative changes to provide meaningful learning opportunities for students classified as English Learners. The EL Roadmap contains 4 principles: (1) Asset-oriented and needs-responsive schools; (2) Intellectual…

While the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all families and communities, it has particularly devastated students of color, students from low-income families, English learners, youth in foster care, unhoused students, students with disabilities, and other historically marginalized children and youth. The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated…

The Twin Cities PBS "Ready to Learn" project focuses on the building of science and literacy skills of diverse students ages 5 to 8. It also promotes equity for historically underrepresented children in science (race-ethnic minorities, low-income children with disabilities, English Language Learners). The Transformative Transmedia…

The purpose of a "Critical and Creative" approach to literacy is not to place the burden of our responsibility on students, but rather to liberate them from the feeling of being trapped by unmalleable, self-defeating circumstances. Through actual demonstration and experience, teachers need to give students the confidence that they are…

Each preservice or inservice teacher who faces the prospect of student diversity in clinical experiences or practice settings does so with an individual set of assumptions about cultures and languages that differ from his or her own. Mezirow (1991) maintained that reflections on such assumptions and presuppositions about oneself and others can…