Dean Smith

BLE 407

M2- Part B: Think, Connect & Respond

How do current policy trends affect the education of Emergent Bilingual Learners? Describe how

these affect your role as an educator. Explain what barriers you might face when trying to

implement culturally relevant pedagogy.

● Current policies limit educators’ abilities to support students who are EBs, however,

newer laws are helping overcome these older laws that obstruct progress.

● Prop 203 prevents ELLs from learning in their primary language, which studies have

shown severely lengthens the time it takes for students to learn another language.

● As a result, I or other educators legally can’t translate instruction to an EBs primary

language so that they better understand what is expected of them.

● However, newer laws are providing educators with workarounds to better help students

who are EB. One of these is Senate Bill 1014.

● Senate Bill 1014 helped allocate and establish additional funding to better support ELL

programs while changing certain requirements that ELL students must undergo.

● Barriers I expect to face for implementing culturally relevant pedagogy is the fact that

some translations cause certain words or phrasing to lose their meaning compared to their

primary language.

● Another barrier is having a very diverse class because something that might be culturally

relevant to one group of students is completely irrelevant to another group of students due

to culturally implicit biases.