Immersion programs face a variety of challenges that are common to the field, such as lack of materials appropriate for students' language abilities, assessment, teacher recruitment and retention, balancing content and language, and relevant, high quality professional development for teachers. However, within specific micro-contexts, other issues…

Drawing on the post-structural views and the literature on teacher identity and agency, and using narrative inquiry, this paper describes how one teacher candidate majoring in Spanish negotiated her identities across time and space and how her identity negotiations interacted with her agency. The recursive analysis of qualitative data sources…

This article is framed by the notion of "educación" and how it influenced the narratives of resistance of 12 seasoned bilingual teachers (Solórzano &Yosso, 2002). Using an oral narrative approach, we share participants' descriptions of the connections between their "educación" within their families and communities and how…

Classrooms tend to be absolute spaces, places where fluidity is rejected and nearly everything--from people, to ideas, to practices and policies--is viewed and organized through binary logic. Because binary logic is implicitly accepted as the natural order in schools and the structures resulting from it are highly unmalleable, individuals who…

This article highlights two bilingual families who participated in a larger study titled "Revaluing Readers and Families." Drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives to highlight the experiences of a Greek and English speaking family and a Spanish and English speaking family, this article explores how these two bilingual families…

Drawing on sociocultural perspectives, this article illustrates the potential for extending figured worlds through cultural artifacts. Using thematic and multimodal analysis, the authors first compare how spaces of authoring were produced in two professional development settings: Proyecto Bilingüe and Critical Education Studies. Following one…

Having orally proficient Spanish speaking heritage learners in a class alongside monolingual English speakers who are learning Spanish as a second language is quite the challenge: the heritage learners' ability to converse can be intimidating to the non heritage learner, but at the same time, the non heritage learner's ability to grasp the grammar…

This qualitative research looks at the effects that language choices and cultural practices have on identity development in the education of minority students in the United States. It examines the educational journey of Irma, a Latina educator. Through the analysis of interviews with the participant, this paper intends to show the effects of…

This edited volume is a collection of personal accounts, in narrative and interview format, of the formative literacy experiences of highly successful second language users, all of whom are professional academics. Representing 14 countries of origin, the contributors, who are well known specialists in language teaching as well as a variety of…

This study compared the narratives of three groups of advanced speakers of Spanish with different learning backgrounds. The first group was made up of heritage speakers; the second group was composed of missionaries that had recently returned from a two-year sojourn in a Spanish-speaking country; and the third group comprised students who had…