Educating emergent bilingual youth in high school: The promise of critical language and literacy education by Park, J. Y. (2023)

Educating Emergent Bilingual Youth in High School: The Promise of Critical Language and Literacy Educationby J. Y. Park narrates the educational experiences of seven emergent bilingual youth in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. This book review underlines how Park uses critical language pedagogies in action to shed light on students' assets and challenge the deficit perspectives teachers and schools may have about them. Through these critical lenses, three ESL teachers and the emergent bilingual youth explore themes related to race, identity, and citizenship through effective pedagogical strategies such as dialogic problem-posing, translanguaging through “poetry inside out,” the use of multimodal texts and student-led research. As students embark on their learning journey, they develop their literacy, critical, and reflective skills, manifesting their agentive selves. The book also provides suggestions for emergent bilingual educators, schools, teacher education programs, researchers, and policymakers to disrupt deficit views of emergent bilinguals that keep them from seeing their full potential. In addition, it advocates for ESL teachers, who often are not supported at their schools, and for emergent bilinguals who should not and cannot leave their funds of knowledge and stories outside the classroom door.