CABE Riverside Chapter #6

"The life of an undocumented child brings special challenges not found in books on their library shelves: feelings of isolation from neighbors, the burden of secrecy, and constant fear of deportation," writes librarian and author Natalie Dias Lorenzi for The Pragmatic Mom.

"As a librarian, these books are difficult to match with the kids who need them, because a child obviously isn’t going to come up to me and say, 'I’m in this country illegally. Do you have any books with characters like me?'

I’d love to add more titles to this list, so if you have other recommendations for books with characters who are undocumented, I’d love to hear about them!"

🕊️Losing your family’s language can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration, Kat Chow writes for The Atlantic, but it’s one she wants to prevent.

Chow’s parents migrated to the United States from China in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her parents spoke Cantonese and Taishanese but were also fluent in English. When Chow’s older sister Steph was in kindergarten, she requested that their parents speak only in English, and her parents acquiesced. Over time, Chow's ability to speak Cantonese faded.

Chow’s parents migrated to the United States from China in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her parents spoke Cantonese and Taishanese but were also fluent in English. When Chow’s older sister Steph was in kindergarten, she requested that their parents speak only in English, and her parents acquiesced.

What Chow and her sisters experienced is called language attrition: the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill. Reversing language attrition is “really about ‘time’ with that language—and ‘high-quality’ time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor who studies infant development and language acquisition, told Chow. Byers-Heinlein estimates that children need between 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with high-quality interactions in order to learn a language.

“The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort,” Chow continues. Betty Choi taught her kids their heritage languages, Chinese and Korean, as she was learning them herself. She cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages, before she ended up creating her own curriculum.

Another parent Chow spoke with, Hieu Truong, is slowly introducing her son to Vietnamese while being realistic about the ease of bilingualism: “I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”

“This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too,” Chow continues. “I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal.”

Full essay in the comments.

"Immigration is a hot topic. There are many ideological differences and issues to consider, but there are also many stereotypes to break," writes Hispanic Mama. "As an immigrant myself and as an American, it’s important to make sure my children understand the tremendous value of why we call ourselves a nation of immigrants.

I know this can be a challenging topic to discuss with little kids or kids who don’t have a personal story with immigration. The good news is that there are children’s books about immigration that will help kids to get a glimpse of what it’s like to walk in the shoes of other children who are immigrants themselves or whose lives are forever changed by immigration."

See the full list in the comments.

A rich trove of Asian American and Pacific Islander history lives in academic journals and university library stacks that many students don’t know how to tap into.

A new multimedia textbook developed out of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center is trying to change that.

✍️ Josie Huang
📸 Billy Hawkins

Your title may change but that doesn’t mean your mission has to.

Keep carrying the torch for multilingualism.

Powerful Women

Worldwide over 7000 languages are spoken. While linguistic diversity is valued by many countries in the world, 40% of these languages are endangered.

Many ESL and bilingual teachers are left to wonder how they can support linguistic diversity and empower multilingual learners with the gifts of their languages.

We can have a great impact on our students and their families by increasing their confidence and self-esteem and their language identities.

The small and big things we do each day convey messages about languages.

• label the walls in languages students speak
• provide books in many languages
• offer guest speakers and readers in languages other than English only
• learn words in the languages students speak
• listen to students read in the languages they can
•Invite students to write in the languages they can
• show genuine interest, and excitement around languages
• give students space, and time to talk with same language peers

The fact is that when language is ignored, there may be a danger of limiting participation and cutting off valuable resources.

Every child deserves to be seen, heard, and valued for who they are fully and completely.

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