Emergent Bilingual and Multilingual Learners in California: Californians Together Passing the Torch to the Next Generation of Advocates (1996 to Present)

Abstract

I am an immigrant, born to formerly undocumented parents who left Hong Kong for the United States with barely a middle school education and a pair of tourist visas. Separated from my parents for four years, I later joined them at the age of seven. Upon arriving in the United States, I was one of three English Learners (ELs) in the entire elementary school. I had not known at the time what this label would signify until I became a classroom teacher in New York City 15 years later. In my current role as an assistant professor at California Polytechnic State University, part of a network of state universities that prepares approximately 6,000 California teachers annually for public school classrooms (California State University, 2019), my work centers on historical and contemporary perspectives of culturally, racially, and linguistically marginalized peoples and environments. In my daily work as a teacher educator, I prepare future teachers so that they can create more socially just classrooms through deepening their knowledge and practices toward greater civic engagement and advocacy for the most underserved students in their classrooms and schools. tears parents left their country because States excellent. The well created ways for me to engage meaningfully with disciplinary ideas I English.