Call for Submissions: Rethinking Bilingual Education

Posted by Rethinking Schools on June 9, 2014

You may have heard that we have started work on a new book, Rethinking Bilingual Education.

We’ve received many good articles in response to our first call for submissions, but we still need the voices of practicing bilingual educators, students, and activists.

We’ve extended our deadline to July 10th.

We are looking for articles that show how you integrate social justice themes into your classroom curriculum, how you confront issues of equity and access in your classroom and school community, or how you deal with the pressures of assessment and standardization without sacrificing the integrity of your bilingual teaching.

In this book, we are defining bilingual education as occurring in instructional settings where teaching and learning take place in two languages with the objective of developing long-term biliteracy. We are particularly interested in articles that describe K-12 bilingual classroom teaching and curriculum–those that are social justice oriented, story-rich, replicable and critical.

We are especially looking for articles about:

• teaching in bilingual classrooms from a social justice perspective
• anti-bias lessons/units (teaching about gender, race, class, ableism, etc.)
• social justice lessons across the curriculum (particularly in math and science)
• special education in bilingual contexts
• helping students value and use non-dominant languages
• perspectives from a diverse range of bilingual programs (especially programs that incorporate African American English, ASL, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, or Russian)
• family involvement
• effects of testing or CCSS on your bilingual program

Students’ voices are important; make sure we can hear them! We especially encourage submissions from teachers and students of color, particularly those who speak a language other than English as their first language.

Please remember that Rethinking Schools is not an academic journal. We want the writing to be lively, conversational, and to avoid the kind of needless jargon that infects so much academic writing. Please approach your writing as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, filled with anecdotes and the voices of teachers, parents, and/or students.

Traditional academic/scholarly articles will not be considered for this book.

The best way to understand what works for Rethinking Schools is to read through several issues of the magazine with an eye to how the authors show specifically what they do in the classroom and how they integrate information about the topic into the article. Specific models you might want to look at include “Sin Fronteras Boy” by Grace Cornell Gonzales and “Aquí y Allá: Exploring Our Lives Through Poetry-Here and There” by Elizabeth Schlessman Barbian. As a model of writing for the magazine, see anything by Linda Christensen.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/index.shtml

Before you begin writing, check out the submission guidelines.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/about/guidelines.shtml

Submission deadline: July 10th