Ofelia Garcia (Graduate Center, Urban Education and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages) and Carmina Makar (City College, Teaching Learning and Culture)

This seminar will engage students in critically thinking about how language policies in society and education are linked to sociopolitical ideologies in different nation-states. The seminar focuses on the role that language policies, enacted from the top, have played in constructing, sometimes, better futures, but other times, inequities and differences among speakers with various social characteristics. The seminar will also expand understandings of how people at the local level, as well as educators, negotiate language and literacy policies from the bottom-up. To enlarge these theoretical understandings, cases are drawn from throughout the world, using a global lens to expand our local understandings and practices. New York City will also serve as the laboratory to study the language practices of different communities and to reflect on the relationship between those practices and the language policies in New York City schools.

See the recap from the May 2, 2016 “Global Perspectives on Language and Education Policy Research Poster and Outreach Session” showcasing the work of graduate students in the course. Additional information about the poster presentations can be found here.

Students in the course also co-edited a special issue of the Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature on “Linguistic diversity, equity, and pedagogical innovation in higher education.”