I really appreciated how your reflection wove the videos with the readings in a way that surfaces the contradictions baked into schooling. The point you raised about trust struck me how for undocumented students, simply stepping into a classroom carries a kind of risk most teachers never have to think about. It reminded me of Baker-Bell's framing of Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, where classrooms don't just fail to recognize students' voices but actively turn them into liabilities. In both cases, the institution sets the terms of belonging, and students have to contort themselves to fit.
Your critique of ELPA was really interesting. These assessments pose as neutral instruments, but they are more like mirrors that only reflect a narrow version of English, and in doing so, erase the multiplicity of students' repertoires. It made me think of Crip Linguistics' challenge to the very notion of fluency. When fluency is defined in proximity to whiteness and able-bodied norms, what hope is there for students whose strengths flourish outside those rigid categories? Assessments like ELPA then are technologies of exclusion.
I was especially moved by your personal note on losing "academic Spanish" (Also, I a hundred-percent relate!). That feels like a wound inflicted not by accident but by design - an outcome of schooling that insists English must dominate even beyond classroom walls. It made me wonder how many "heritage losses" like yours go unacknowledged in the name of integration. Translanguaging, as you said, offers a counter-narrative: not just as a pedagogical trick, but as a way of insisting that students' linguistic repertoires are whole and worthy.
What I took from reading your post is that the reminder that immigrant students are not passive recipients of charity but, as you wrote, "experts" in navigating hostile terrains. That reframing feels urgent because it shifts the gaze from pity to recognition, from deficiency to resourcefulness.
Your critique of ELPA was really interesting. These assessments pose as neutral instruments, but they are more like mirrors that only reflect a narrow version of English, and in doing so, erase the multiplicity of students' repertoires. It made me think of Crip Linguistics' challenge to the very notion of fluency. When fluency is defined in proximity to whiteness and able-bodied norms, what hope is there for students whose strengths flourish outside those rigid categories? Assessments like ELPA then are technologies of exclusion.
I was especially moved by your personal note on losing "academic Spanish" (Also, I a hundred-percent relate!). That feels like a wound inflicted not by accident but by design - an outcome of schooling that insists English must dominate even beyond classroom walls. It made me wonder how many "heritage losses" like yours go unacknowledged in the name of integration. Translanguaging, as you said, offers a counter-narrative: not just as a pedagogical trick, but as a way of insisting that students' linguistic repertoires are whole and worthy.
What I took from reading your post is that the reminder that immigrant students are not passive recipients of charity but, as you wrote, "experts" in navigating hostile terrains. That reframing feels urgent because it shifts the gaze from pity to recognition, from deficiency to resourcefulness.