Margarita Jimenez-Silva – författare

Today’s schools compartmentalize children and curriculum. Standardization dictates curricular content and assessment, narrowing the focus of classrooms and schools that serve diverse populations from varied geographical backgrounds. Against the backdrop of the western-derived, institutional framework of schooling are cultural ways of knowing that are place-based, holistic, experiential, and connected to oral storytelling. In the current movement toward acknowledging and understanding cultural knowledge, teacher education programs need to work in collaboration with cultural communities, honoring traditions and epistemologies and seeking to revitalize and sustain (Paris, 2012) language and culture. Such initiatives inform the big picture of educational reform and enrich mainstream university teacher education programs. This book highlights the journeys, challenges and unfolding stories of transformation that reside within university/community/school partnerships focused on cultural and linguistic revitalization through schooling.

This edited volume brings together voices of Latinx students, teachers, teacher educators, and education allies in Latinx communities to reveal ways in which today’s sociopolitical context has given rise to politically-sanctioned hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric. Contributors—key stakeholders in the education of immigrant Latinx children, youth, and college students—share how this rhetoric has exacerbated existing systemic injustices within K-Higher Education. They draw attention to counternarratives that speak to leadership and strength of community. Contributors include high school and college students and faculty, community organizers, and early career academics, whose voices are too often underrepresented in academic conversations. This book highlights professional and personal acts of courage, community organization, and the transformation of students and educators who are stepping into leadership roles to affect change. Understanding that teaching and learning are political acts, we call all those vested in Latinx communities to engage in small and large acts of agency to collectively impact change in our K-Higher Education systems.