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Leveraging is often described as the process of using the home and community languages of children and youth as a tool to access the “academic” or “standard” varieties of languages valued in schools. In this vein, researchers have called on practitioners to leverage the stigmatized language practices of children and youth in schools for their academic development. In this review, we interrogate the notion of leveraging commonly used by language and literacy scholars. We consider what gets leveraged, whose practices get leveraged, when leveraging occurs, and whether or not leveraging leads to robust and transformative learning experiences that sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of children and youth in our schools, particularly for students of color. We review scholarship steeped in Vygotskian-inspired research on learning, culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and bilingual education research that forefront the notion that the language practices of children and youth are useful for mediating learning and development. We conclude with a discussion of classroom discourse analysis methods that we believe can provide documentation of transformative learning experiences that uncovers and examines the linguistic resources of students in our twenty-first-century classrooms, and to gain a common language around notions of leveraging in the field.

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This article explores the role of profanity and graphic humor in the bilingual wordplay of Latin@ middle school students. We highlight the creativity, skill, and communicative competence embedded in this transgressive wordplay, revealing how these youth employed profanity and graphic humor to index ethnic solidarity and construct bilingual identities. We argue that further exploration of such wordplay might well reveal other functions and meanings that are obscured when it is simply dismissed as inappropriate. [bilingual wordplay, Latin@ youth, transgressive language practices, communicative competence] bs_bs_banner

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Although there has been a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of charter schools in the research literature, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to English language learners (ELLs) in charter schools. Moreover, the charter school research has predominantly focused on whether or not charter schools are effective rather than how or why high-performing charter schools work, particularly for ELLs. We contend that researchers must expand their focus beyond access and achievement and begin to grapple with questions related to the quality of programs for ELLs in charter schools. To meet an emerging need in the field, we synthesize several strands of existing research—related to charter schools, school improvement, and ELLs in traditional public schools—to propose a five-component framework that describes essential elements of quality programs for ELLs in charter schools. We conclude with a discussion of implications of our framework for research, policy, and practice.

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This article focuses on the reported experiences of three focal students who participated in a Spanish/English dual language program in their southern California school district throughout their elementary and middle school years. All three students identify as Mexican-origin and speak Spanish, English, and the Indigenous language of Zapoteco and have different relationships with their languages. The framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities (Blackwell, Boj Lopez & Urrieta, 2017) is used to explore the practices engaged in by the students, including language use and transnationalism (Sánchez, 2007), as well as the investment to learn and use a language as part of their identity (Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000). Even though dual language programs provide much needed linguistic supports for language maintenance, perhaps more importantly, they provide support for ideological shifts towards language maintenance rather than transition to English-only instruction. However, the three students experienced a segmented and limited focus on Spanish language development in middle school compared to their elementary school experience. The authors discuss implications for outside school spaces that can support authentic language use, in addition to school-sanctioned language programs promoting multilingualism.