Empowering Students

Abstract

This chapter showcases how faculty in the early childhood studies department in one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse states in the United States create discourse spaces to empower students. These spaces invite students to critically explore how the power relations of society affect individuals' language development, learning, and identities. In so doing, the English monolingual norm of educational settings is questioned. The faculty empowers students, many of whom are dual language learners themselves, by providing them with the theoretical and pedagogical foundations to best support our youngest citizens, who are more linguistically and culturally diverse than ever. This chapter provides numerous assignment examples that illustrate how each course creates a pedagogical discourse space to honor the languages and cultures of all students, to decenter the English norm that is prevalent in the education system, and to enable students to create more linguistically and culturally inclusive and equitable classrooms.