Language, Culture, and Teaching

Distinguished multiculturalist Sonia Nieto speaks directly to current and future

teachers in this thoughtful integration of a selection of her key writings with crea-
tive pedagogical features. Offering information, insights, and motivation to teach
students of diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, examples are included
throughout to illustrate real-life dilemmas about diversity that teachers face in their
own classrooms; ideas about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and
ways to engage with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry.
Designed for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional
development courses, each chapter includes critical questions, classroom activities,
and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context.

Language, Culture, and Teaching

 explores how language and culture are connected to teaching and learning
in educational settings;
 examines the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language and culture
to understand how these contexts may affect student learning and achievement;
 analyzes the implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for classroom
practices, school reform, and educational equity;
 encourages practicing and preservice teachers to reflect critically on their
classroom practices, as well as on larger institutional policies related to
linguistic and cultural diversity based on the above understandings; and
 motivates teachers to understand their ethical and political responsibilities
to work, together with their students, colleagues, and families, for more
socially just classrooms, schools, and society.

Changes in the Third Edition:

This edition includes new and updated chapters, section introductions, critical
questions, classroom and community activities, and resources, bringing it up-to-
date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in the
U.S. and beyond. The new chapters reflect Nieto’s current thinking about the
profession and society, especially about changes in the teaching profession, both
positive and negative, since the publication of the second edition of this text.

Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy and Culture at the

College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.
Language, Culture, and Teaching Series
Sonia Nieto, Series Editor

Nieto
Language, Culture, and Teaching: Critical Perspectives for a New Century,
Third Edition

McKinney
Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice:
Crosscurrents and Complexities in Literacy Classrooms

Fecho/Clifton
Dialoguing across Cultures, Identities, and Learning

Mirra/Garcia/Morrell
Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers,
Educators, and Students

Kumagai/López-Sánchez/Wu (Eds.)
Multiliteracies in World Language Education

Vasquez
Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children: 10th Anniversary Edition,
Second Edition

Janks
Doing Critical Literacy: Texts and Activities for Students and Teachers

Basterra/Trumbull/Solano-Flores (Eds.)
Cultural Validity in Assessment: A Guide for Educators

Chapman/Hobbel (Eds.)
Social Justice Pedagogy across the Curriculum: The Practice of Freedom

Andrews
Re-framing Literacy: Teaching and Learning in English and the Language Arts

Visit www.routledge.com/education for additional information on titles in

the Language, Culture, and Teaching series.
Language, Culture, and
Teaching
Critical Perspectives
Third Edition

Sonia Nieto
Third edition published 2018
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Names: Nieto, Sonia, author.
Title: Language, culture, and teaching : critical perspectives / by
Sonia Nieto.
Description: Third edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series:
Language, culture, and teaching | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009394 | ISBN 9781138206144 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138206151 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Multicultural education--United States. | Minorities--
Education--United States.
Classification: LCC LC1099.3 .N543 2018 | DDC 370.117--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009394

ISBN: 978-1-138-20614-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-20615-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-46569-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
This book is dedicated to teachers: veterans and those
new to the profession; those who understand the
importance of language and culture in teaching, and
those who want to learn more; those who love their
students and those who are prepared to do so; and,
finally, to all those teachers and prospective teachers
committed to making a positive difference in the lives of
their students, in the profession itself, and in our world.
Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: Language, Literacy, and Culture: Aha! Moments in

Personal and Sociopolitical Understanding 1

PART I
Setting the Groundwork 17
1 What Is the Purpose of Schools? Reflections on Education in an
Age of Functionalism 19
2 Multicultural Education and School Reform 29
3 Revisiting the High Hopes and Broken Promises of Public
Education: Still an Uncertain Future 53

PART II
Identity, Learning, and Belonging 63
4 Culture and Learning 65
5 Lessons From Students on Creating a Chance to Dream 93
6 The BC 44, Ethnic Studies, and Transformative Education 134

PART III
Developing a Critical Stance 153
7 Profoundly Multicultural Questions 155
viii Contents
8 Affirmation, Solidarity, and Critique: Moving Beyond
Tolerance in Multicultural Education 163
9 Becoming Sociocultural Mediators: What All Educators Can
Learn From Bilingual and ESL Teachers 181

PART IV
Praxis, Hope, and the Future 195
10 Nice Is Not Enough: Defining Caring for Students of Color 197
11 Doing Their Part: Teachers as Leaders in Multicultural
Education 202
12 Critical Hope … in Spite of it All 215

Index 221
Preface

Fifteen years have passed since the first edition of Language, Culture, and
Teaching was published. They have been momentous years both nationally
and globally. Events such as 9/11 and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;
global immigration and dramatic demographic changes in our nation and
the world; the election of the first African American president in our history
and, more recently, the election of a man who had for years claimed that
the previous president was not born in the United States and therefore was
not qualified to be president: all these and many other issues are significant
for today’s classrooms and schools, even more than they were in 2000.
No matter where they work, teachers today face students who are more
diverse than ever in terms of race, language background, ethnicity, social
class, culture, religion, ability, and other differences. This situation has major
implications for teaching and learning, and for whether or not teachers feel
sufficiently prepared to meet the challenges of diversity. Current statistics
indicate that children of color constitute the majority of one and two year
olds in the nation, signaling an enormous change in U.S. school enrollments
now and in the coming years. In fact, by 2019, children of color are
expected to be the majority of all children in the nation. In addition, chil-
dren of color disproportionately live in poverty, complicating the issue of
diversity even further (Children’s Defense Fund, 2014).
Because of these changing demographics and dramatic global realities,
including the massive relocation of populations due to war, famine, and
other natural and human catastrophes, language and culture have increasingly
become vital concerns in classrooms across the United States. Yet few educators
besides specialists in bilingual education, ESL, or urban and multicultural
education feel adequately prepared through their coursework and other
pre-practicum experiences to teach students who are different from them.
As a result, many educators are at a loss as to what to do when faced with
students whose race, ethnicity, social class, and language differ from their
own. They are equally unprepared to understand—or to deal effectively
with—the significant learning gaps that arise from unequal and inequitable
learning conditions. For many teachers, their first practicum or teaching
experience represents their introduction to a broader diversity than they
x Preface
have ever experienced before. This is true for all teachers—not just White
teachers—because our society is still characterized by communities that are
largely segregated by race, ethnicity, and social class. Consequently, most of
us are accustomed to living near, working with, and learning about people
who are most like us.
In spite of these realities, many textbooks designed for current and future
teachers devote inadequate attention to issues of difference, and even less to
critical perspectives in teaching. Many are little more than dry and boring
treatments of so-called “best practices” or thoughtless techniques that leave
teachers’ creativity and analysis on the sidelines. In contrast, the motivation
behind this textbook is to provide a different model, one that engages you
as an active learner and builds on your intelligence and creativity as an
educator. It is addressed primarily to you, current and future teachers in our
nation’s schools. In it, I hope you will find the information, insights, and
motivation to teach students of diverse backgrounds.
Throughout this book I have attempted to present examples of: real-life
dilemmas about diversity that you will face in your own classrooms; ideas
about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and ways to engage
with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry. There are no
easy answers, no pre-packaged programs that can fix the uncertainties that
teachers encounter every day. However, there are more thoughtful ways to
address these problems than those currently presented in many textbooks.
My own view is that positive and innovative perspectives and strategies can
honor both teachers’ professionalism and students’ abilities and social and
cultural realities.
Specifically, then, the goals of this book are to:

 explore how language and culture are connected to teaching and

learning in educational settings;
 examine the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language and
culture to understand how these contexts may affect student learning
and achievement;
 analyze the implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for classroom
practices, school reform, and educational equity;
 encourage practicing and preservice teachers to reflect critically on their
classroom practices, as well as on larger institutional policies related to
linguistic and cultural diversity based on the above understandings;
 motivate teachers to understand their ethical and political responsi-
bilities to work, together with their students, colleagues, and families,
for a more socially just classroom, school, and society.

About the Third Edition

Language, Culture, and Teaching is a compilation of previously published
journal articles and book chapters, most of which I have written over the
 Preface xi
past two decades. The goals and basic framework of this third edition
remain the same as those of the first and second editions. However, more
than half of the chapters are new or updated, that is, most were written
within the past decade. Given the vast changes in our schools and nation in
that time, the new chapters reflect my thinking about the profession and
our society, especially about changes in the teaching profession, both positive
and negative, that we have experienced over the past several years.

Overview
The book is organized in five parts: an introduction and four sections. Each
section begins with a brief description of the themes considered in that sec-
tion. Following the chapters are critical questions, ideas for classroom and
community activities, and suggested resources for further reflection and study.
Critical Questions are based on the ideas presented in the chapter and
they ask you to build on the knowledge you have learned by analyzing key
concepts further. Activities for Your Classroom are suggestions for applying
what you have learned by engaging in a deeper analysis of the concepts.
Often, it is suggested that you work with colleagues in developing curri-
culum or other classroom-based projects. Community-Based Activities and
Advocacy are projects outside of the classroom setting, and they may take
place in the school or the school district, in the city or town in which you
teach, or even at the state or national level. Supplementary Resources for
Further Reflection and Study end each chapter with a list and brief
description of resources that will be helpful as you continue to reflect on
and study the issues addressed in the chapter.
The Introduction consists of a preliminary chapter, “Language, Literacy,
and Culture: Aha! Moments in Personal and Sociopolitical Understanding.”
This chapter provides a foundational background for the text by describing
my own experiences of how issues of language and culture brought me to
an awareness of conditions both inside and outside of public education. It
also suggests some implications for teaching and learning.
Part I: Setting the Groundwork consists of three chapters that set the
conceptual framework for links among language, culture, and teaching.
Chapter 1 concerns the age-old question of the purpose of schools, a con-
sequential question all teachers should be asking themselves as they enter the
profession. In presenting a comprehensive definition of multicultural edu-
cation that takes into account both structural inequality and the significance
of equity in education, Chapter 2 goes far beyond superficial approaches
that focus only on holidays and heroes. Chapter 3 was originally written for
a book commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the National Academy of
Education (NAEd), describing the NAEd through its goals, accomplish-
ments, and challenges. In my chapter, I provide an overview of public
education in the twentieth century through three focal movements for
social justice—desegregation, multicultural education, and bilingual
xii Preface
education—and I discuss the future of these and other movements for
equity in education.
Young people of all backgrounds struggle with issues of identity and
belonging, and for those who are culturally, linguistically, and racially margin-
alized, the stress is even greater. Questions of identity are related to learning
because it is through their identities as competent learners that students can
succeed academically. Hence, matters of identity are central to an appreciation
of linguistic and cultural diversity. Part II: Identity, Learning, and Belonging
focuses on identity—social, cultural, racial, and linguistic—and how it
influences students, teaching, and learning. Chapter 4, from my book The
Light in Their Eyes, introduces you to a wide-ranging definition of culture that
rejects simplistic understandings that focus primarily on superficial trappings.
Chapter 5, first published in the Harvard Educational Review almost twenty-
five years ago yet still relevant today, centers on the views of a diverse
group of young people about schooling, identity, and success. Part II ends
with Chapter 6, recently published in a book on the Latino civil rights
movement in education. The chapter explores my own experience as a
young faculty member with the struggle for ethnic studies at Brooklyn
College in the early 1970s. More importantly, it presents the case for the
significance of ethnic studies as an integral part of a school’s curriculum, not
only for marginalized youths but for all students.
The chapters in Part III: Developing a Critical Stance concern some of
the information, insights, and practices teachers need to know in order to be
effective with the wide range of students they are likely to teach. The three
chapters in this section focus on what it takes to become critical teachers.
Chapter 7 is a short piece that encourages teachers to look beyond the
shallow treatments of diversity and to instead ask what I’ve called “pro-
foundly multicultural questions,” that is, questions that are at the very heart
of social justice, access, and equity even though at first glance they may not
seem to be about multicultural education at all. Chapter 8 presents concrete
examples of teachers who work with students of diverse backgrounds with
“solidarity, courage, and heart,” suggesting lessons that all teachers can
learn from them. Chapter 9 addresses how all teachers, regardless of their
own cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds, can become sociocultural
mediators.
Because many teachers have had little personal or professional experience
with diversity, they are often unaware of how to critically address questions
of race, identity, and achievement. The final section of the text, Part IV:
Praxis, Hope, and the Future, presents critical examples of multicultural
education in practice. Chapter 10, “Nice Is Not Enough,” provides con-
crete suggestions for “going beyond niceness” in teaching students of color.
Chapter 11, originally published to commemorate the twenty-fifth anni-
versary of NAME, the National Association for Multicultural Education,
presents examples of teachers who embody what it means to be multi-
cultural educators. Finally, Chapter 12 suggests that in spite of the
 Preface xiii
tremendous challenges posed by the state of public education today, critical
hope is an essential ingredient in working for social justice and equity in
education. The chapter also serves to recapitulate many of the points
addressed throughout the book.

Final Thoughts
Educational inequality is repugnant in a society that has pledged to provide
an equal education for all students regardless of rank or circumstance. Yet
educational inequality is commonplace in schools all over our country. It
continues to be the case that far too many students are shortchanged
because educational policies and practices favor students from backgrounds
that are privileged in social class, race, language, or other differences. At the
same time, schools remain grossly unequal in terms of the resources they are
given. It is also undeniably true that students’ zip codes have more to do
with the quality of the education they receive than most of us would care
to admit. In addition, students’ linguistic and cultural differences are often
dismissed or ignored by teachers who have been trained to be “color-blind”
and who refuse to see differences. The chapters in this book ask you not
only to see differences but also to critically affirm and use them as valuable
resources in your curriculum and pedagogy.
The “savage inequalities” in schools that Jonathan Kozol (1991) so power-
fully described a quarter century ago remain ubiquitous. This reality makes it
apparent that educational change needs to take place in a number of domains,
including at the ideological, societal, and national levels. In the meantime,
students who differ racially, culturally, and linguistically from the mainstream
are particularly vulnerable in a society that has deemed differences to be
deficiencies and poverty to be a moral transgression. But change can begin at
any level, and the chapters in this book are based on the assumption that
teachers can and, in fact, must make a difference in the lives of the children they
teach. Teachers alone cannot do it all, of course, because institutional barriers
to student learning—including macro-level impediments such as lack of access
to quality childcare and to higher education for parents and guardians, sub-
standard housing, lack of appropriate health care, and inadequate employment
opportunities—are enormous. Nevertheless, when teachers work together
with other educators and concerned citizens, they can do a great deal to change
not only their own practices but also help schools and districts change their
policies to become more equitable for all students. When district-wide policies
as well as classroom practices change to promote the learning of all students and
when our society, teachers, and schools learn to view students’ differences in a
more hopeful and positive way, the result can be that more students will soar to
the heights that they are capable of reaching and deserve.
We are living in a challenging sociopolitical context, one different from
any other in many ways, not the least of which is the tremendous cultural
and linguistic diversity evident in our schools and the often negative
xiv Preface
reaction to this diversity in policy and practice. Yet the ways in which new
teachers are prepared to face these differences, and the books used to help
them, have not changed enough. New times deserve new textbooks that
respect the professionalism of teachers and other educators, honor the
identities of students and their families, and validate the nation’s claim to
educate all students of all backgrounds. That is the premise of this book.

Acknowledgments
Finally, a word of thanks to friends and colleagues who had a hand in this book.
When I originally wrote the journal articles and book chapters reprinted in this
text, many of them helped me think more clearly and carefully about my ideas.
These friends and colleagues are too numerous to mention here, but I
acknowledged them in the original works. I also want to reiterate that my work
has been enormously enriched by the wise counsel of the numerous colleagues,
students, and young people I have worked with over the years. Finally, I want
to express my gratitude and profound respect for Naomi Silverman, publisher at
Routledge and friend of many years. When we first met, Naomi helped me
think differently and creatively about textbooks for teachers, and I feel blessed to
have worked with her on this and other projects before she retired.

References
Children’s Defense Fund (2014). The state of America’s children. Washington,
DC: Author.
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New
York: Crown.
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the following publishers and organizations for permitting pre-

viously published journal articles and book chapters to be reprinted in this book.

Introduction
Nieto, Sonia (2013). Language, literacy, and culture: Aha! Moments in
personal and sociopolitical understanding. This chapter appeared originally
in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2013.

Chapter 1
Sonia Nieto, “What is the Purpose of Schools? Reflections on Education in
an Age of Functionalism.” From Language, Culture, and Teaching: Critical
Perspectives, 2nd ed., 2010. Used by permission of Taylor & Francis.

Chapter 2
Nieto, Sonia; Bode, Patty, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of
Multicultural Education, 6th Ed., 2012. Reprinted by permission of Pearson
Education, Inc., New York, New York.

Chapter 3
This chapter was first published in a volume commemorating the 50th anni-
versary of the National Academy of Education. Michael J. Feuer, Amy I.
Berman, and Richard C. Atkinson (Eds.) (2015). Past as Prologue: The National
Academy of Education at 50. Members Reflect, Washington, DC: National
Academy of Education. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 4
Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From Sonia Nieto (2010). The
Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities, 10th
xvi Acknowledgments
Anniversary Edition. New York: Teachers College Press. Copyright © 2010
by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

Chapter 5
Sonia Nieto, “Lessons from Students on Creating a Chance to Dream,”
Harvard Educational Review, 64:4 (Winter 1994), pp. 392–426. Copyright (©)
1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Chapter 6
Sonia Nieto, “The BC 44, Ethnic Studies, and Transformative Education.”
In Anaida Colón-Muñíz and Magaly Lavadenz (Eds, 2016), Latino Civil
Rights in Education: La Lucha Sigue (pp. 72–87). New York: Routledge.
Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Group LLC Books.

Chapter 7
Nieto, Sonia (2003). Profoundly multicultural questions. Educational Leader-
ship, 60(4), pp. 6–10. Reprinted by permission of the Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Chapter 8
This chapter was first published in Multicultural Education, vol. 1, no. 4
(1994), pp. 35–38. Copyright is held by the author.

Chapter 9
Reprinted with permission from Issues in Teacher Education: Special Issue on
Preparing Bilingual Teachers. Summer 2017, Volume 27, Number 2.

Chapter 10
Excerpt from Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School © 2008
by Mica Pollock. Reprinted by permission of The New Press. www.the
newpress.com

Chapter 11
This material first appeared as a chapter in Multicultural Education: A Renewed
Paradigm of Transformation and Call to Action, a commemorative volume
celebrating the National Association for Multicultural Education’s silver
anniversary, edited by H. Prentice Baptiste, Ashley Ryan, Blanca Araujo,
and Rose Duhon-Sells, and published by Caddo Gap Press in 2015.
 Acknowledgments xvii
Permission to republish granted by joint copyright holders Caddo Gap
Press, NAME, and H. Prentice Baptiste.

Chapter 12
“Critical hope… in spite of it all,” by Sonia Nieto. In R. Elmore (Ed.), I
Used to Think, and Now I Think: Reflections on the Work of School Reform
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press). Copyright (©) by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted with permission.
Introduction
Language, Literacy, and Culture: Aha! Moments
in Personal and Sociopolitical Understanding

This chapter focuses on the intersections among language, literacy,

and culture, and what these intersections have meant for me personally,
and what they can mean for students who have been marginalized,
neglected, or made invisible by traditional understandings of the role
of education. Although not always linked conceptually in the past, the
more recent tendency to connect language, literacy, and culture gives
us a richer picture of learning, especially because students with mar-
ginalized identities related to language, race, ethnicity, and immigrant
status have traditionally had a low status in many societies.
One result of this reconceptualization is that more education programs
are reflecting and promoting a sociocultural perspective in language and
literacy. Such a perspective is firmly rooted in an anthropological and
sociological understanding of culture; a view of learning as socially
constructed; and an understanding of how students from diverse seg-
ments of society experience schooling due to differential access to lit-
eracy specifically, and to education more broadly. The context I
discuss in this chapter is grounded in my own experience as a Puerto
Rican second-generation immigrant—also called Nuyorican or, more
recently, Diasporican—in the United States, although the implications
for teaching and learning go beyond my own limited experience.
I am aware that multiple and conflicting ideas exist about these
theoretical perspectives, but some basic tenets of sociocultural theory
can serve as a platform for this chapter. In what follows, I explore a
number of these tenets, illustrating them with examples from my own
experiences to demonstrate why a sociocultural and sociopolitical
perspective is invaluable in uncovering some of the tensions and
dilemmas of schooling and diversity.

The language of sociocultural theory includes terms such as discourse [à la

James Gee (1990), with a small ‘d’ and a capital ‘D’]; habitus and cultural
capital as defined by Bourdieu (1986; see also Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977);
hegemony as articulated by Gramsci (2012); power and privilege as discussed by
2 Introduction
Foucault (1980); social practice as defined by the New London Group (1996);
as well as identity, hybridity, and even the very word literacy (Janks, 2010).
Today, these terms have become commonplace, but if we were to do a
review of the literature of some thirty years ago or so, we would probably
be hard pressed to find them, at least as currently used. What does this
mean? How has our awareness and internalization of these terms and
everything they imply changed how we look at teaching and learning?
Let’s look at some of the assumptions underlying literacy itself. It’s generally
accepted that certain family and home conditions promote literacy, including
an abundant supply of books and other reading material, detailed conversa-
tions between adults and children about the books they read, and other
such practices (Snow et al., 1991). I have no doubt that this is true in many
cases, and although I didn’t have access to these things as a child, my husband
and I made certain to provide them for our own children, as well as for our
grandchildren. I hope we’ve made their lives easier and fuller as a result.
But what about the children for whom these conditions are not present?
Should they be doomed to educational failure because their parents didn’t
live in the right neighborhood, weren’t privileged enough to be formally
educated, or didn’t take their children to museums or attend plays? Should
they be disqualified from learning because they didn’t have books at home?
Unfortunately, the answer to these questions is too often “Yes.”

Sociocultural Theory and Autobiography

I begin with my own story, not because I believe that autobiography is the
only way to learn about language, literacy, and culture. My story is not
unique, and my purpose is not to single myself out as an “exception,” in the
way that Richard Rodriguez did, intentionally or not, in his painful auto-
biography Hunger of Memory (1982). Rodriguez’s perspective about being a
Spanish-speaking immigrant is, in fact, directly counter to mine: while he
concluded that abandoning Spanish was the price he had to pay for success
in the United States, my conclusion is that there is no need to erase part of
one’s identity in order to be successful. On the contrary, I believe that
having more than one language has enriched me both personally and pro-
fessionally. Being bilingual and biliterate is a legacy that I cherish every day.
I use my story simply to underscore the fact that young people of all back-
grounds can learn regardless of the language they come to school with, and
that they need not be compelled, as Rodriguez felt he had to, to abandon
their family and home language for the benefits of an education and a
higher status in society.
I was like the millions of young people in classrooms and schools around
the nation who arrive at school eager to learn, to make friends, and to fit in.
Unfortunately, too many of these children, because they do not yet speak
English, end up as the poster children for the so-called “achievement gap”
because the educational system does not understand the resources that they
 Introduction 3
bring to their education. Because they come to school with a language—
although it is not English—rather than being “linguistically deprived” or
“limited English proficient,” these children are instead, in the words of
Leslie Bartlett and Ofelia Garcia, “emergent bilinguals” (Bartlett & Garcia,
2011).
Given my background and early life experiences, it seems improbable that
I would be an academic discussing literacy and learning. Conventional
educational research would assume that my home and family situation could
not have prepared me adequately for academic success. My parents came to
the United States as immigrants from Puerto Rico, fleeing the unique
poverty of colonialism, and they quietly took their place in the lower paid
and lower status of society. I spent my first ten years in a fifth-floor tene-
ment apartment, and the next three years in another equally depressing
neighborhood in Brooklyn, both of which were entry points for immigrants
from around the world, including my parents, Federico Cortés and Esther
Mercado. My mother did not graduate from high school, and my father
never made it past fourth grade.
In my family, we never had bedtime stories, much less books, but while
my father never really mastered English, he read The Daily News (in English)
religiously every day. At home, we didn’t have a permanent place to study,
nor did we have a desk “with sufficient light and adequate ventilation,” as
our teachers suggested. We didn’t have many toys, and I never got the
piano lessons that I so desperately wanted from the age of five. We never
went to summer camp, and we didn’t have gymnastics, ballet, or tennis
lessons. We never learned how to ride a bike, nor did we take part in any
kind of sports. As a family, we didn’t go to museums or other places that
would give us the cultural capital described by Bourdieu (1986), thought to
be a requisite to succeed in school. We spoke only Spanish at home, even
though teachers pleaded with my parents to stop doing so. And when we
learned English, my sister and I spoke a nonstandard, urban Black and
Puerto Rican English.
In a word, because of our social class, ethnicity, native language, and
discourse practices, we were the epitome of what are described in the
United States as “children at risk,” “disadvantaged,” and “culturally
deprived.” Nevertheless, I was fortunate that I had a family who stressed the
virtues of education, even if they themselves had not had the privilege of an
education—or more likely, because of that fact. But they kept right on
speaking Spanish, they still didn’t buy books for our home, and they never
read us bedtime stories. Yet my parents valued education and literacy: they
told us funny stories about greenhorn Puerto Ricans (jíbaros) just arriving
from the island, as well as the riddles and tongue-twisters they had learned
as children back on the island.
My father worked in a delicatessen on Delancey Street in lower Manhattan,
a historically immigrant community, for 20 years and when it closed, he
bought a bodega, a small Caribbean grocery store in Brooklyn, with his
4 Introduction
savings. Although he could barely write, he could add a column of numbers
in his head with dizzying speed. My mother worked in the bodega as well,
and she too had many talents, such as the embroidery and handwork that
she had learned on the island. Also, raising my brother, who has autism,
took all the patience and skill she had as a parent. These skills, however,
were never called on by my teachers; our family was simply thought of as
culturally deprived and disadvantaged, another segment of the urban poor
with no discernible competencies.

Schooling and the First Aha! Moments

I attended a run-down ghetto school in Brooklyn just a few blocks from my
apartment. My schoolmates were African Americans, as well as immigrants
from Puerto Rico, other places in the Caribbean, and Italy and Russia,
among other European countries. One day in particular resonates in terms of
language learning. I arrived at school as a fluent Spanish speaker but speaking
no English. I guess I hadn’t learned how to tie a bow yet. I wrote about this
incident (Nieto, 2011) in a book titled Words Were All We Had: Becoming
Biliterate Against the Odds, edited by Maria de la Luz Reyes. This book
chronicles the many obstacles for those of us who entered school knowing
Spanish but who did not yet speak English. I had just started school and there
I was, a six year old in a first-grade classroom in New York trying to tie my
hat. I didn’t have the words to let my teacher know that I needed help. I
remember feeling mute. I stood there, gesturing and making sounds that
made no sense to her, attempting to ask her to tie my hat. I felt helpless.
This scene is as vivid to me today as if it was yesterday. I suppose my
memory says something about the tremendous vulnerability I felt at not
being able to make myself understood, the sheer panic of not knowing
English. Although I spoke Spanish, it was not the officially sanctioned language
of school. By the end of that year, besides learning enough English to get
along, as well as the rudiments of reading, I learned other valuable lessons,
and this was my first Aha! Moment: I learned that reading would open up
the world to me, that learning was exciting, and that education was the best
hope for a better life. In other words, I learned that literacy was important
for personal enlightenment, academic learning, and improved life options.
But unfortunately, I learned other less sanguine lessons as well: I learned
that it was a handicap to be Puerto Rican; I learned that English was the
language of value and “culture.” I learned that although Spanish was the
language of family and love and nurturing, it was also a language of low
status. I learned that school was where you learned things that were
worthwhile and important, and that home was where you learned things that
you never talked about in school. Most of all, I learned that to get ahead, you
must speak, read, and write only English. The result was a tremendous wall
between home and school. It was only after I became a teacher myself that I
began to question why this should be so.
 Introduction 5
When I was 13 years old, we moved from our tenement apartment to a
small two-family house in a more middle-class community in Brooklyn.
In that neighborhood, I was able to attend an excellent junior high and
high school. I didn’t particularly like either, especially the high school. It
was too big and impersonal, and as one of only three Puerto Ricans (my
sister was another one) in a student body of 5,600 students, I felt invisible.
In retrospect, however, I realize that it was there that my sister and I got
the quality education that we needed to prepare us for college, a dream
beyond the wildest imagination of my parents. Before then, we had
attended a junior high school with few expectations for our academic
success. Given the high dropout rate of Puerto Ricans at the time (and still
now), we would have been lucky to even have graduated from high
school.
This led to another Aha! Moment: My new address made a profound differ-
ence in the education that I was able to get, that is, my zip code guaranteed
that I would receive an excellent education. In addition, because of the high
school that I attended, I learned Standard English, eventually dropping the
“ain’t” and the “mines.” For a number of years, I also tried to hide the fact
that I spoke Spanish.

Teaching and More Aha! Moments

Although I didn’t have many social relationships in high school, I was a
good student, and I received a couple of scholarships. Accepted into a local
college, I worked throughout college and commuted daily by subway. At
St. John’s University, I followed my dream to become a teacher, something
I had thought about since I had been a child. In 1966, with a degree in
elementary education, a student teaching experience in a mostly White
middle-class neighborhood, and teaching certification from the New York
City Public Schools, I began my teaching career in an intermediate school
in an impoverished community in Brooklyn. Even though I had thought I
would be the perfect teacher who would inspire my students and impress
my colleagues, it became clear to me right away that I was facing greater
challenges than I had expected.
The school was a sad place, with angry and disenchanted students, and
tired and burned-out teachers, some of whom were racist and dismissive of
the students. Many administrators seemed to have given up, and some were
just waiting for the day when they could retire. The students, all of whom
were African American and Puerto Rican, lived in poverty, with few
opportunities either in school or in the community. Classes were over-
crowded and chaotic, and there was a palpable sense of despair in the
school. There was also the problem of labeling: not only were my students
labeled as “culturally deprived,” lazy, or incapable of learning, but because I
taught the so-called “non-English (NE) students,” I too was labeled as the
“NE” Teacher, even though I was perfectly fluent in English.
6 Introduction
In spite of the fact that I loved my students and that many of them were
capable and smart, I became discouraged. Although I believe that I became
a pretty good teacher in the two years I was there, learning some useful
strategies, developing more self-confidence, and forming close connections
with my students, I realized even then that it was not enough. But it was
there that I had my next Aha! Moment. I saw firsthand that societal structural
inequality, brutal poverty, unrelenting racism, and other limiting realities, as
well as the unjust policies and practices in schools, had more to do with my
students’ learning than what I did in the classroom. Given this situation, I
began to wonder how much I could accomplish as a classroom teacher.
Two years later, an exciting opportunity presented itself: a call went out
for bilingual teachers to staff a new, experimental elementary school in the
Bronx. P.S. 25, the Bilingual School, was to become the first public school
in the Northeast, and only the second in the nation, to use students’ native
languages in instruction, while at the same time teaching them English. In
spite of the fact that at the time there were already over 1,000,000 Puerto
Ricans in New York City, in the two years that I had been in the system
(and as a former student in that system), of the 55,000 public school teachers
in the city, I had never met another teacher who was either Latina or fluent
in Spanish. They must have been hiding somewhere, because at P.S. 25, the
principal was able to find and recruit about thirty of us as bilingual teachers,
about half of whom were Hispanic, and the others were Whites and African
Americans who were fluent in Spanish.
As a child, my teachers made it clear to me that speaking Spanish was a
problem, and this idea was reinforced in my teacher preparation program.
As a preservice teacher, I had been warned to keep my “cultural baggage”
outside my classroom door. I had been taught that culture was peripheral to
teaching and learning, and that it had nothing to do with intelligence or
merit. My ideas began to change as soon as I started teaching at P.S. 25. I
began to believe that language, culture, race, and ethnicity, both instructors’
and students’, are inextricably tied to teaching, whether we admit it or not.
At the Bilingual School, language and culture were cherished and affirmed,
and they had equal status with English and mainstream American culture.
Whereas my previous school had been a sad place, P.S. 25 was an affirming
place, one where we could all—students, staff, and families—feel proud of
speaking Spanish, something I had never before experienced, except in the
company of my family. It was a place where nobody made excuses about
being Puerto Rican or Cuban or Dominican, and where teachers used
students’ histories and realities as important sources for the curriculum. At
the same time, I learned that when teachers bring their entire selves into the
classroom, including their identities, they are being both true to themselves
and honest with their students.
Being at the Bilingual School brought another Aha! Moment: it was there
that I came to realize that the role of parent involvement in the education
of their children is significant. When I was a child, my parents had stayed
 Introduction 7
away from our schools, no doubt because of their own limited schooling
and the fact that neither felt comfortable in a place where Spanish was not
spoken (even though my mother was quite fluent in English). Culturally,
school felt like an alien and unwelcome place to them. In contrast, at P.S.
25, parents were involved in ways that would have astounded my own
parents: not only did the students’ parents join the PTA and volunteer in
the classroom, but also they took part in hiring new teachers and in setting
the overall climate of inclusion and advocacy in the school. As a teacher, I
was expected to engage in family outreach, and I learned to do so with
enthusiasm. I visited my students’ homes, where I was always treated like an
honored guest. I communicated with families through phone calls and letters as
well (this was way before email), and I invited family members to my classroom
and to their children’s exhibits and performances. These activities made a
difference both in students’ attitudes and in families’ acceptance and respect.

Doctoral Studies and Teacher Education: A Deepening

Consciousness
After four years at the Bilingual School, first as a fourth-grade teacher and
later as a Curriculum Specialist, I secured a position as an instructor in the
Puerto Rican Studies Department at Brooklyn College in a co-sponsored
teacher education program. I was thrilled to be working in higher education,
something that my station and my cultural identity would not have pre-
dicted. There, I taught courses on the sociology of education, on the Puerto
Rican child, and on methods of teaching in bilingual classrooms. It was
there, in fact, that I decided that this was to be my lifelong profession.
At Brooklyn College, I learned about the importance of agency and the
possibility that it could lead to social change. It was a heady time for ethnic
studies, and political education was part of our daily experience. We had
protests and take overs every week, and it was during those that I learned to
speak to large audiences, both at the Faculty Senate and also at the large
demonstrations in the Quad. Although the administration wanted our
department—which was seen as unruly and not quite ready to take care of
its own affairs—we demanded self-determination as a department. After a
five-day occupation of the Registrar’s Office, I was arrested as one of the
“BC 44.” As a result of being steeped in the politics of the 1960s and 1970s,
I had another Aha! Moment: in the words of Frederick Douglass, the iconic
nineteenth-century freed slave and abolitionist, “Power concedes nothing
without a demand. It never did and it never will” (Douglass, 1857).
Given my decision to pursue teacher education as a profession, I applied
to and was accepted as a doctoral student at the School of Education at the
University of Massachusetts, an institution that was also undergoing pro-
found changes in curriculum and pedagogy. My doctoral studies were
transformative. Not only did I take courses with professors from the School
of Education who were doing groundbreaking work in multicultural
8 Introduction
education and social justice, but I was also able to take courses outside the
School of Education that had a profound effect on me. For example, I took a
class with Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, just as their groundbreaking book
Teaching in Capitalist America (1976) was being published. In their class, I learned
that our society’s structural inequality made it almost impossible for students of
color and all students living in poverty to get a fair shake in education,
something that I had seen firsthand but that was never spoken about in
“polite” circles. Their research demonstrated that without a shadow of a
doubt, privilege begets privilege, and conventional myth to the contrary,
climbing up the ladder of success is no easy matter in an unequal society. Their
research showed, also, that it is a father’s income that makes the most difference
in whether a child will get a good education and future opportunities. The
idea of meritocracy and fair play, I learned, were largely myths.
The research, as well as the theories of other scholars such as Martin
Carnoy, Michael Apple, Joel Spring, Maxine Greene, James Banks, and
others, not only disabused me of the pie-in-the-sky myths about education
being the great equalizer, but they also affirmed the significance of culture,
language, and race in teaching and learning. Years later, Gloria Anzaldúa
was one of the first Latina theorists I encountered, and it was riveting for
me to read her words about the power of language and culture. She helped
me understand why, as a Spanish speaker in a rigidly English-dominant
society, and in spite of my many years of education and professional merits,
I still felt like an outsider. She wrote: “So, if you really want to hurt me,
talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic
identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot
take pride in myself” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 59).
Hegemonic language policies are not limited to feeling pride or shame about
one’s language. Hegemony goes much deeper than personal idiosyncrasies: it
can keep people in positions of subservience and powerlessness, or elevate
them to unearned positions of privilege and power. During my graduate
studies and later, as a young professor, I was privileged to serve on a com-
mittee that hosted Paulo Freire for month-long visits for several years. I
immersed myself in his theories, and they helped me discover another Aha!
Moment: that education is always political, that is, whatever pedagogy or practice
we use inevitably says something about our ideology. In the words of Freire,
“All educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator’s part….
It could not be otherwise” (Freire, 1985, p. 43). In other words, even those
decisions that might seem innocent and natural betray what we believe, as
well as our values and biases. These decisions include the books and curri-
cula we select, the relationships that we have with students, our perspectives
about their communities and identities, how we set up our classroom, the
choices of which languages to use, or how to teach reading—all these
decisions and more, whether large or small, are political decisions.
Given my experience as a teacher and later, a teacher educator, these
theories were powerful and made a great deal of sense to me. Even though
 Introduction 9
I was one of the so-called “success stories” that people like to point to, I
knew that I was in a tiny minority among my Puerto Rican peers. I was
luckier than most, and although I wish that I could say that education made
all the difference, I cannot. I had the benefit of parents and others who
loved me, opportunities that made a difference, and the good fortune to go
to good schools as an adolescent. I have never given up on education, but I
have learned that it has serious limitations.
In spite of the limits of public schooling, I continue to believe that what
teachers do, although partial, is also significant. I have learned also that literacy
is not just about teaching the mechanics of reading or imparting information
to students; rather it is always either advocacy for or against the students
whom we teach. Again, the words of Paulo Freire describe this point
powerfully: “We are political militants,” he wrote, “because we are teachers”
(Freire, 1998, p. 58).

Lessons from Aha! Moments: Preparing Teachers with

Critique and Hope
I conclude this chapter with a few of the lessons I’ve learned from my Aha!
Moments. Beyond my personal experience, I recognize that as educators we
have to live with the contradictions of our work, while at the same time we
need to prepare teachers with both critique and hope. A friend of mine has
a sweatshirt that says, “Old age is not for sissies,” and in the same way, I say
that teaching is not for sissies. Instead, teaching is for those with courage and a
critical mind, and that’s why critique is important. We also need hope because
without it, we can become disenchanted, disillusioned, and burned out.
Without both critique and hope, teachers are too often swallowed up by a
system that is inequitable and hegemonic, that replicates power and privilege,
and that rewards students according to their identities and postal codes.
In what follows, I use the words of some of the teachers and students
with whom I’ve had the privilege to work to illustrate these lessons.

Relationships Are at the Heart of Teaching

When I was a Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, South Africa in 2012, I asked a group of students in an
education class to tell me about teachers who had made a difference in their
lives. The class was very diverse, and I found it intriguing that students of all
ethnic backgrounds had more or less the same message: One after another,
they talked about teachers who were patient, understanding, supportive,
and who believed in them. Yet they rarely mentioned what the teachers
taught, or even how they taught it. While content and pedagogy are
important, these young people reaffirmed what we already know, that is,
that relationships must be the bedrock of any learning. When asked about
memorable teachers, most people, like the students I asked in South Africa,
10 Introduction
will most likely remember the attitudes, dispositions, and behaviors of teachers
who made a difference, rather than the subject matter they taught. That’s
because teachers who are successful with students inevitably become socio-
cultural mediators, that is, they learn about their students, they help them to
negotiate academic spaces, and they affirm students’ identities while helping
them to explore the world beyond their limited realities (Diaz et al., 1992).
Sociocultural mediation is important because literacy is not just about
learning to decode; rather, it is a social practice that cannot be separated
from the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts in which it takes place. An
example comes from Mary Ginley. When she was a graduate student in my
program, she wrote in a journal that she kept for my class about what
sociocultural mediation means in practice. She challenged the notion that
being “nice” was enough:

Every child needs to feel welcome, to feel comfortable. School is a

foreign land to most kids (where else in the world would you spend
time circling answers and filling in the blanks?), but the more distant a
child’s culture and language are from the culture and language of the
school, the more at risk that child is. A warm friendly, helpful teacher is
nice, but it isn’t enough. We have plenty of warm friendly teachers
who tell the kids nicely to forget their Spanish and ask mommy and
daddy to speak to them in English at home; who give them easier tasks
so they won’t feel badly when the work becomes difficult; who never
learn about what life is like at home or what they eat or what music
they like or what stories they have been told or what their history is.
Instead, we smile and give them a hug and tell them to eat our food
and listen to our stories and dance to our music. We teach them to
read with our words and wonder why it’s so hard for them. We ask
them to sit quietly and we’ll tell them what’s important and what they
must know to “get ready for the next grade.” And we never ask them
who they are and where they want to go.
(Ginley, 2010, p. 114)

This issue of who they are and where they want to go is a deeply political
question because it acknowledges that literacy and teaching are about whose
story is told. Asking these questions is what sociocultural mediation is about,
because it is only when teachers become sociocultural mediators that they
can forge strong relationships with their students.

Teach Students to Question and to Be Curious

While it’s important to teach students the skills and competencies they need
to negotiate the world successfully, teachers also need to teach students to
be critical. It is necessary, in other words, to teach them to not only read
the word, but as Paulo Freire said, to “read the world.” This means teaching
 Introduction 11
students to probe, to be curious, and to question. What does this look like
in practice? A good example comes from Ron Morris, an African American
student we interviewed over 20 years ago for a case study. Ron talked
about the first class in which he had ever been interested, a class on Black
history in eighth grade. Until that time, he had never learned anything
about African American history in school, surely a terrible indictment of
education in a nation with more than 40 million African Americans.
Except for that class, Ron had been known as a troublemaker, a child
who was alienated both in and out of school. He had never connected to
school, until school connected to him. This is what he said about that class:

It was basically about Black people, but it showed you all people instead of
just Black people. It showed us Latinos. It showed us Caucasians. It
showed us the Jews and everything how we all played a part [in] what
society in any country is like today. I’d sit [in that class] and just be like,
I was just so relaxed. I just felt like the realest person on earth.
(Nieto, 1996, p. 270)

What will it take until every young person feels like “the realest person on
earth”? For one, it will take creating learning opportunities that are relevant
to students’ lives and respectful of their identities, while also teaching them
to question everything, including their own assumptions, values, and even
identities.

Understand that Teaching Is Advocacy for Social and Political Change

Unless teachers understand that teaching is advocacy for social and political
change, inequities will continue to exist. This necessitates asking what I have
called “profoundly multicultural questions” (Nieto, 2003), that is, questions
that at first blush may not seem to be “multicultural” at all but that, in the
end, are about ensuring that all students have access to a high quality and
equal education. It means asking questions, such as “Who’s taking calculus?”,
the kind of course that is often a gatekeeper to college access; or “Where is
the bilingual [or ESL or special education] program? Is it in the basement?”,
a placement that says something about its relative status in the school; or
“What are our children worth?” That is, why is more money spent on
educating some children—generally the most privileged—while the most
underserved continue to languish in schools that are under-resourced? (see
Nieto, 2003 for a more in-depth treatment of this issue).
An example comes from Hyung Nam, a high school social studies teacher
in Portland, OR, who I interviewed for my recent book, Finding Joy in
Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just
Practices in U.S. Schools (Nieto, 2013). Having been teaching for 11 years,
Hyung became involved with teachers from the organization Rethinking
Schools (RS) almost from the beginning. He said he was amazed when he
12 Introduction
found them, because he had never before met a group of activist teachers.
Indicating that he probably would have given up as a teacher if he hadn’t
found the group, Hyung said, “I think I feel inspired and really empowered
and honored to be in a role where I could help students to question the
world and expand their horizons and to see the possibility that they can be
agents in the world to change the world to be a better place” (Nieto, 2013,
p. 147). In fact, Hyung took the advocacy function of education very
seriously, saying, “I see part of my job is to agitate. You know, if we think
about the kind of society, the dominant mainstream society that we have,
that’s kind of why I’m a teacher is to agitate and make people think and
question things” (Nieto, 2013, p. 122).

Conclusion
It would be easy to throw up our hands and say that education is too full of
contradictions, that it preaches what it cannot deliver, that it’s a utopian
dream. Yes, all these things may be true. Yet, it is a teacher’s responsibility
to remain hopeful in spite of all these things. As Paulo Freire reminds us,
“The educator’s biggest problem is not to discuss whether education can or
cannot accomplish, but to discuss where it can, how it can, with whom it can,
when it can; it is to recognize the limits his or her practice imposes” (Freire,
2007, p. 64). The limits are real, but so is the power of hope. Living
through the contradictions, although not easy, is an essential obligation of
both teachers and teacher educators.
My Aha! Moments have helped me understand not just my own reality, but
also the realities and lives of others. This is why I believe that it’s our
responsibility as educators, and particularly as teacher educators, to engage
teachers in serious introspection and reflection, the kind of reflection that
demands an honest and rigorous understanding of their own position in the
world, and of what it has to do with the profession they’ve chosen. When
they do these things, they will be better prepared to connect in authentic and
caring ways with their students, because they will understand that socio-
cultural and sociopolitical understandings of the world are not just personal
Aha! Moments, but rather moments of transcendence and transformation.

References
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Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Co.
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cation and Dominican immigrant youth in the Heights. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of
theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood
Press.
 Introduction 13
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture.
London: Sage.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Economic reform and the
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Diaz, E., Flores, B., Cousin, P. T., & Soo Hoo, S. (1992). Teacher as sociocultural
mediator. Paper presented at the annual AERA meeting, San Francisco, CA, April
1992.
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there-no-struggle-there-no-progress.
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14 Introduction
Critical Questions
1 Have you had any Aha! Moments concerning your identity? What were they?
Describe how they came about and what you learned from them. How might
your insights help you teach your own students?
2 According to the author, her teachers made it clear that Spanish was not wel-
come in the classroom. Knowing what you know about identity, language, and
culture, how might you address language diversity differently? What strategies
might you use to welcome your students’ languages in the classroom?
3 Although zip codes matter, they are not destiny. As a teacher and advocate for
your students, what can you do—individually and with colleagues, working
alone or within organizations—to minimize the impact of students’ zip codes
on the outcomes of their lives?

Activities for Your Classroom

1 Rather than “keeping your cultural baggage outside,” as the author was coun-
seled, how can you bring your students’ cultures into the classroom? Develop a
classroom activity or unit in which students are encouraged to use their
identities—racial, cultural, linguistic, other—in their learning. Think about how
you can recruit parents and other family members in this endeavor. Examples
might include writing a family history with their children; interviewing family
members (parents, grandparents, and others) about their immigration stories; or
instituting an after-school family literacy project. Use your imagination!
2 Create a unit on how people of different backgrounds have experienced
“coming of age” in the United States and elsewhere. Locate stories by authors
of diverse backgrounds for the grade level you teach. You can consult the
webpages Teachingforchange.org, Tolerance.org (see references above), your local
library, or fellow teachers for examples.

Community-Based Activities and Advocacy

If, as the author suggests, teaching is advocacy for social and political change, think
about how you can become active in your particular community, whether at the class-
room, school, community, town/city, state, or national level. Here are some examples:

 Is there a policy in your school concerning the use of students’ home languages?
Are students allowed, prohibited, encouraged, or discouraged from doing so?
Find out and, if you believe the policy in place unfairly restricts students’ use of
their home language in school, what can you do about it? Can you involve
your students in changing it? What about their families? Your colleagues?
 Attend a school board meeting in your town or city. Inform yourself about the
questions being discussed. How would your students be affected by the board’s
decisions? What can you do about it? How can your students be involved?
 If you are not already a member, join a professional organization that advocates
for students of diverse backgrounds such as NABE (National Association for
Bilingual Education), NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English),
NAME (National Association for Multicultural Education), and others as well as
their state and local affiliates.
 Introduction 15
Supplementary Resources for Further Reflection and Study
Gándara, P., & Hopkins, M. (2010). Forbidden language: English learners and restrictive
language policies. New York: Teachers College Press.

This book takes a serious look at the deleterious effects of language policies that
limit students’ use of their native language in school, focusing on three states—
California, Arizona, and Massachusetts—that have enacted such policies.

Nieto, S. (1992). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education

(1st ed.). New York: Longman.

The first edition of this book was selected by the Museum of Education as one of
the 100 books to help define the field of education in the twentieth century. It was
one of the first to explore multicultural education through sociopolitical and socio-
cultural contexts. Patty Bode became co-author beginning with the fourth edition;
the seventh edition is forthcoming in 2018 (New York: Pearson). Chapter 1,
“Understanding the Sociopolitical Context of Schooling,” provides a wide-ranging
description of the field.

Nieto, S. (2015). Brooklyn dreams: My life in public education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Education Press.

This memoir follows the author’s life, both personal and professional, from her early
childhood in Brooklyn to her career as a teacher educator in Massachusetts. It
explores issues of identity, culture, and both the promise and failure of public
education to fulfill its stated goal of equal education for all.

Reyes, M. de la L. (Ed.) (2011). Words were all we had: Becoming biliterate against the
odds. New York: Teachers College Press.

Consisting of narratives by well-known Latin@ academics, this book describes how

the eleven authors featured were able to maintain their bilingualism and become
biliterate “against the odds.” The editor, Maria de la Luz Reyes, concludes the
volume with lessons about the importance of biliteracy for individuals, families, and
the nation.

Rodriguez, R. (1982). Hunger of memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez. Boston,

MA: David R. Godine.

In this influential autobiography, Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American immi-

grant, captures the loneliness and pain of learning English in a household where only
Spanish is spoken. This was, and continues to be, a controversial book because of
the author’s public stances against bilingual education and affirmative action.
Introduction
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Education Press.
Reyes, L. M. de la L. (Ed.) (2011). Words were all we had: Becoming biliterate against the
odds. New York: Teachers College Press.
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MA: David R. Godine.

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