Professional Development

Supported by the University of Illinois Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, in February 2024 I delivered a virtual professional development workshop for K-12 teachers in the Urbana School District #116. The workshop was titled “It’s on us: Valuing the linguistic diversity of students” and in this workshop, which was attended by over 40 teachers, staff, and administrators, we discussed language variation in English as well as Spanish-English bilingualism. We talked through different ways language variation can be centered in K-12 spaces, across all disciplines. Thanks to previous funding from University of Illinois’s Initiative for Multiracial Democracy, I was able to provide each attendee with two books to further our collective knowledge of language variation in classrooms and in society at large. These books are:

  • Don’t Say Ain’t, Irene Smalls

  • Growing Up Bilingual, Ana Celia Zentella

  • Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools, Guadalupe Valdés

  • Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America, Ed Morales

  • Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, Anne Charity Hudley & Christine Mallinson

  • We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom, Anne Charity Hudley & Christine Mallinson

  • Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, Edited by: Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, Diane J. Goodman, Davey Shlasko, Rachel R. Briggs, & Romina Pacheco

Funded by the University of Illinois’s Initiative for Multiracial Democracy, I organized a professional development workshop for K-12 teachers in Champaign and Urbana. Titled “Our ideas of speaking: Language variation and identity,” the workshop is divided into three sections: 1) a talk and interactive activities delivered by me and two invited colleagues (Drs. Aris Clemons and Victor Fernández-Mallat), 2) a showing and discussion of the Emmy Award Winning documentary “Talking Black in America,” and 3) a collaborative exercise in which teachers personal action plans for incorporating information learned into their teaching practices.

The goal of the workshop is to discuss the “how” and “why” of language variation, how speakers make specific choices about which language variety or language to use with certain people, and what is deemed “appropriate” when it comes to language use.