The supporting Immigrants School Series videos and how when it comes to their education resurface a lot of ideas for me on how it often reveals the importance of trust, language, and power to shape their everyday experiences. When it comes to students that are undocumented, schools are not spaces where they can thrive but sites of potential risk when they first encounter it. This is when trust comes in and becomes the foundation of learning where teachers must create environments where immigrant students feel explicitly welcomed and supported. This is why educational tools such as translating and diversifying the material implemented in the classrooms is so fundamental to affirm the students' presence, language, history, and culture.
Another thing that really stuck with me throughout these videos is how the education system continues to operate within these white-centered definitions of language proficiency that further marginalizes migrant students. The ELPA (English Language Proficiency Assessment) was the first thing that came into my mind as a clear example. Even when it is obviously perceived as an “objective” measure of English fluency, it clearly works as a tool from the dominant rhetoric that defines fluency according to the most rigid, monolingual, and colonial forms. By policing immigrant students' language practices and encouraging a monolingual learning form, these students are still being denied of better academic rich material and continue to not create spaces where they can be agents of their own learning and be able to engage with critical material. All of this, also made me reflect on how translanguaging offers a tool to affirm migrants students' linguistic expertise. This tool is often treated as a problem specially in EB programs where they keep perpetuating a monolingual style of learning. In my personal experience in the ESL program they would often encourage students to only use English in both inside and outside the classroom time where they would encourage them in a "friendly” way. This type of language policing made me change my way in which I utilized English and Spanish. Taking into account that I did lose a big part of my "academic Spanish” because of this, I still find it hard to engage academically in Spanish or with sources in Spanish because I keep perceiving it as only a language which is used in social settings rather than both in social and academic environments. Finally, one last thing I really appreciated about these readings and videos was the Crip Linguistics reading that emphasizes immigrants as active agents of change by framing them as experts of being able to manage and deal with hostile environments as we saw on the videos and how these also makes them experts in being able to adapt to systems that marginalizes them and even thrive on them. This perspective pushes to recognize the importance of treating immigrants and refugees as active subjects of resilience, resistance and resourcefulness. This approach to immigrant and refugee education requires the dismantling of inaccurate tools like ELPA and the centering of translanguaging in educational spaces as a practice of empowerment that allows marginalized groups to thrive in a system that is designed to oppress them.