Students will gain the benefits of a culturally competent teacher who is racially informed. If teachers recognize how oppression and systemic racism work and if they look through a racial lens in their work, they will understand that systemic racism impacts student lives and will start the lifelong journey to do the human work necessary…
Poetry has been written and celebrated both as artistic expression and as a form of civil disobedience.Some overarching questions to consider include, how do these poems disturb what could be perceived as peace? How do they address issues of resistance, equity, and acceptance? More importantly, how do they instill confidence and value in one’s culture…
Cambridge Dictionary has announced ‘quarantine’ as Word of the Year 2020, after data shows it was one of the most highly searched words on the Cambridge Dictionary this year. Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top five for both search spikes and overall views (more than 183,000 by early November), with the largest…
The Deaf community is currently debating on what exactly to sign for the U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden. Until now, the community has been spelling the name out, signing B-I-D-E-N, but many public figures, including the president, often get shorthand signs instead of spelling out the name. For example, the sign for Donald Trump is to…
Dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) programs, at the core, are about serving students who have been linguistically and culturally marginalized in U.S. schools (Izquierdo and Medina, in press). However, it is also important to understand that as DLBE has increased in popularity, the ideas of equity and social justice as focal points have been lost in…
A USC Professor is under fire for using a Chinese expression that sounds like an English-language slur. The professor, who was suspended, came under fire from a group of students who wrote a letter and signed it by, “Black MBA candidates c/o 2022.” Professor Greg Patton of USC’s Marshall School of Business was teaching a…
Each year, Americans observe National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15. The holiday celebrates the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. The observation started in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week under President Lyndon Johnson and was expanded by…
Rumi in the Language Classroom Series Vol 2 (See Vol 1 of the series here.) One of the Rumi’s poems in ‘Masnavi-e-Manavi’ tells a story of a deaf man who planned to pay a visit to his sick neighbor. Since he was deaf, he decided to prefabricate a potential conversation and imagine what would go…
A new survey of 246 agents and 111 language schools across five regions taken in July by ALTO (Association of Language Travel Organisations) and has revealed that over the summer 2020 period, both agencies and schools were expecting less than a fifth of business when compared with last year. In all regions except Asia, schools…
In his 1971 hit, Marvin Gaye laments “make me wanna holler, the way they do my life…” The lyrics to this song can be applied to modern-day events surrounding the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the general plight of Black people in the U.S. Embedded in Gaye’s songs and other social justice anthems is…