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Urban contexts where children with a range of abilities, languages, and cultures are served demand unique teacher preparation models. This study contends that ensuring unrestrictive learning environments in inclusive bilingual classrooms, where multiple educators work together, requires teachers to attend to division-of-labor. Informed by cultural historical activity theory, this article explores the kinds of division-of-labor dynamics surfacing in 35 multivoiced postlesson discussions. The focus on division-of-labor surfaced the need for teachers to collectively attend to students' learning while they "hold the center," and purposefully centering student agency. The analysis offers insight for the preparation of teachers for inclusive bilingual classrooms.

Siblings play crucial roles in each other's cognitive and language development because they observe, imitate, and receive guidance and support from each other during their interactions. In this research, we examined trilingual siblings (ages 6 and 9) from an immigrant family with a rarely explored cultural background (American-born children of Korean Chinese parents) and their multilingual interactions with a researcher. Employing cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and Vygotsky's notion of mediation (Vygotsky, 1978), we particularly focused on the roles that the older multilingual sibling took on during interactions and what mediations of meaning-making took place that created learning opportunities. Our analysis was based on the interaction data between the siblings. Findings revealed that the older sibling played a unique role as a linguistic and cultural mediator, assisting meaning-maintaining processes in multilingual interactions by providing interlingual and intralingual interpretation and transferring linguistic and cultural knowledge. Given the current educational landscape that prioritizes learning English, and the complexities of maintaining three languages for trilingual children, this study adds to the literature highlighting the unique roles multilingual children can play in expanding others' languages, literacies, and cultures, as well as facilitating multilingual communicative events.

This conceptual article is guided by the question, how can we build the knowledge base in teacher education to prepare teachers for such education classrooms? I argue that three constructs are essential to the preparation of teachers who work in these settings: mediation, agency, and collectivity. Implications for teacher preparation programs are discussed and praxis examples are provided.

There is a need to better prepare teachers for bilingual classrooms that have students with and without disabilities. This inspired the creation of a new graduate teacher preparation program for the inclusive bilingual classroom in NYC. The program aims to help candidates understand theories and research across bilingual/bicultural education and the teaching of students with disabilities, and how the intersectionality of differences in ability, culture, and language impact learning. This study reports on two candidates' student teaching experiences. It highlights ways in which the candidates reflected on the intersectionality of differences through teaching, as well as the multi-layered positive reactions of students and classroom teachers to their teaching, describing the emotional connections and manifold learning outcomes that resulted. The findings from this study provide valuable information for mentor teachers and teacher preparation programs interested in promoting equity in education through the preparation of inclusive bilingual educators, and has implications for policy development.

Background: Though there has been some attention to how emergent bilinguals learn in relation to languages and cultures, very little research to date has examined similar processes in emergent bilinguals with dis/abilities, including how to understand dis/ability as a source of strength. Purpose: In this article, I explore how dis/ability can mediate learning. To do so, I examine how emergent bilinguals with dis/abilities engage with learning activities in a hybrid space in terms of ability, language, and culture; and how these children's learning is mediated in such a hybrid space. Research Design: This qualitative study documents how 15 bilingual Latinx children with mild dis/abilities in the second through third grades, along with eight bilingual teacher candidates preparing to teach in inclusive bilingual contexts, worked together in a two-year hybrid afterschool program. Findings/Results: Children were able to demonstrate the ability to "compensate" for perceived "weaknesses" and learn in what I characterize as nepantla (in-between) spaces in four different ways: (a) resisting the learning activity; (b) shifting the direction of the learning activity; (c) repositioning the content (within their own knowledge); and (d) using external artifacts. Conclusions: Opportunity-centered encounters attending to language, culture, and ability, built on hybridity theory, allowed for shifting perceptions of children's academic identities. The study highlights an asset-based perspective on dis/ability that rejects ableism. Implications include the need for careful planning and constant nurturing of the bilingual child's multiple fluid identities.

Science education should help children acquire sophisticated understandings about science, how it is done, and how they can be scientists. Consequently, there is a need to explore how minoritized children's linguistic and cultural resources can be employed in the science classroom. This study examined how perceptions of science teaching and learning in bilingual contexts shift from a single tradition to more expansive understandings. Following cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), mediators and turning points were explored to provide evidence for expansive learning. This analysis focused on data from 25 children and four teacher candidates participating in a Spanish bilingual after-school program. To answer the research questions, expansive and non-expansive actions (i.e., speech segments and multimedia products generated in the 10 after-school sessions) were analyzed mostly qualitatively, and supported with descriptive quantitative patterns. Through the analysis, specific mediators and contextual characteristics were identified as turning points for expansive learning. The in-depth analysis of the four after-school sessions including both discourse and multimedia data, revealed the existence of a turning point in one session during which there was a discussion using a video and a multimodal embodied experience with clay. This session included turn and talks, and closed with a whole-group debriefing. Additionally, the study found that the multimedia artifacts (actions around photographs and videos) were more conducive to expansiveness than those with discursive data only. The study concludes that culturally relevant artifacts, combined with instructional moves that accept bilingual children's expansive ways of understanding science, stimulate expansive learning. This study provides ways to explore how bilingual children's out-of-school knowledges can merge with science knowledge in schools, and helps illuminate the role of multiple activity systems in the teaching and learning process. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of having pre-service teachers explore the potential of children's out-of-school knowledges in spaces such as after-school programs where curricular and instructional restrictions are lessened, and that thus favor more expansive forms of teaching and learning.

Latino bilingual children hold rich understandings, which are underexplored and underutilized in the geoscience classroom. Oftentimes, young Latinos possess unique cultural land experiences shaping their place identities. We consider science as language and culture, and propose place-based geoscience hybrid space explorations that are culturally and linguistically relevant. We explore the different elements that help bilingual children learn geoscience using pre- and postsurvey of their understanding of the processes of erosion, transportation, and deposition; children's marks, drawing, and writing on a photograph; and graphic organizers with children's notes. Several different instructional elements for working with Latino bilinguals, organized around five tenets of culture, arise from our analysis: (1) Utilizing multiple linguistic resources, (2) making explicit connections to alternative interpretations of words, (3) using culturally relevant examples, (4) using alternative and creative ways of operationalizing hybrid spaces, and (5) learning in a community of practice.

Children who learn at the crossroads of multiple identities are at risk of experiencing inequality at multiple levels. Intersectionality frameworks have illuminated the relationship between cultural and language differences and dis/abilities, but they can also help us surface the effects dis/ability labels have on language choices for emergent bilingual (EB) children. With the primary objective of assisting the field of Bilingual Special Education (BiSPED), and related fields, move forward, this narrative literature review addresses: (1) How does a dis/ability label impact EBs' opportunities to become fully bilingual/biliterate in their two languages? (2) What does existing research tell us about the learning of bilingual children with dis/abilities in bilingual programs? Findings show that emergent bilinguals have fewer opportunities than their peers to learn in bilingual programs when they have dis/abilities, even though research suggests they can learn bilingually at no additional cost. Implications for researchers and educators are discussed.

Drawing on the concept of transnational funds of knowledge, this article examines how a Cantonese-English emergent bilingual engaged in an after-school literacy program that centered on Latinx experiences and Spanish-language resources. Through analysis of classroom observations, informal conversations with the focal student (Erica) and her peers, and student-created artifacts, we argue that a linguistically responsive curriculum enabled Erica to surface transnational knowledges, expand available bilingual identities, and mobilize her multilingual awareness to teach others. Our findings have implications for honoring transnational histories and bilingualism within the constraints of English-medium instruction and beyond bounded notions of cultural relevance.

This article provides an overview of the editorial goals and perspectives of the journal Exceptional Children, which focuses on critical issues in special education. The editors emphasize the importance of viewing special education as a civil rights issue and promoting diversity and inclusiveness in the publication process. They identify four key issues impacting special education and invite scholarly works that address these issues and offer solutions. The article also discusses the importance of implementation science, technical assistance, and diverse methodologies in special education research. It includes summaries of five articles that cover various topics in special education. The authors express their commitment to learning from the past and advancing special education research. [Extracted from the article]

The field of bilingual special education is currently plagued with contradictions resulting in a serious underrepresentation of emergent bilinguals with learning disabilities in professional science fields. This underrepresentation is due in large part to the fact that educational systems around the world are inadequately prepared to address the educational needs of these children; this inadequacy is rooted in a lack of understanding of the linguistic and cultural factors impacting learning. Accepting such a premise and assuming that children learn in unexpected ways when instructional practices attend to culture and language, this study documents a place-based learning experience integrating geoscience and literacy in a fourth-grade dual language classroom. Data sources include transcribed audio-taped conversations from learning experience sessions and interviews that took place as six focus children, who had been identified as having specific learning disabilities, read published science texts (i.e. texts unaltered linguistically or conceptually to meet the needs of the readers). My analysis revealed that participants generated responses that were often unexpected if solely analyzed from those Western scientific perspectives traditionally valued in school contexts. However, these responses were also full of purposeful and rich understandings that revealed opportunities for expansive learning. Adopting a cultural historical activity theory perspective, instructional tools such as texts, visuals, and questions were found to act as mediators impacting the learning in both activity systems: (a) "teacher-researcher learning from children," and (b) "children learning from teachers." I conclude by suggesting that there is a need to understand students' ways of knowing to their full complexity, and to deliberately recognize teachers as learners, researchers, and means to expansive learning patterns that span beyond traditional learning boundaries.

This study draws upon a survey of writing conceptions and cultural dispositions data, as well as multimodal compositions allowing bilingual teacher candidates to recursively explore and deepen the relationships between language, identity, and culture in learning. We found that teacher candidates did rethink the relationships through the multimodal tool. Moreover, their epistemic writing conceptions were correlated with high intercultural dispositions and multimodal complexity. The multimodal composition allowed candidates to follow individually distinct processes, but they all made more references to their imagined teaching practice at the end of the learning experience. These references were the result of, and resulted in, a deeper reflection of the relationships. Our results have implications for preparing teachers to confront the reality of diverse classrooms through more flexible pedagogical practices that allow for diverse modes of meaning making, such as the multimodal composition in this study.

This study explores the impact of hybrid instructional spaces on the purposeful and expansive use of translanguaging practices. Utilizing technology, the study explores the role of multimodality in bilinguals' language multiplicity and dynamism. The research addresses: (a) how do emergent bilinguals in dual language programs deploy their full linguistic resources (i.e., idiolects) in writing when encouraged to use translanguaging?, and (b) how do home-school hybrid spaces impact emergent bilinguals' use of translanguaging in writing? The study involved 89 children enrolled in Spanish-English dual language programs, with 53 of them participating in storytelling, writing, and other multimodal projects (i.e., photographs depicting their homes, families, and communities), and 36 in a nonparticipatory control group. The data collected include writing samples, audio taping of the children's stories and class sessions, and multimodal projects. The findings are organized around children's ability to negotiate their hybrid languaging practices as both separate and mixed entities when allowed and encouraged to take agency in their learning experiences within a hybrid curricular space.

Focusing on two bilingual children experiencing learning difficulties, I explore the scientific representations these students generate in an afterschool programme where they have opportunities to exercise agency. In the programme, children use a digital camera to document science in their lives and engage in conversations about the products they generate. Acting as agents in this context requires that these children undertake the responsibility of transforming the knowledge and practice of the afterschool community. Using cultural historical activity theory, I analyse child-generated multimodal data and conversations. Findings show that these two bilinguals acted as agents as they responded to the proposed curriculum in a process I call multigenerational learning. This process served to bring to the surface children's culturally relevant practices, allowing them to recognize science in their lives. As other students, teacher candidates and researchers in the afterschool programme engaged in analysing children's work and in conversations with them and others about the multimodal products, negotiations on what counts as science and science knowledge took place. These spaces assisted in generating a more complete "able" view of participating children. This study addresses concepts for expanding the educational involvement of emergent bilingual children perceived as potentially in need of special education services, including the importance of providing opportunities for children to negotiate family and community involvement in curricula and instruction.

Young children in diverse urban contexts bring to school transnational knowledges, complex multilingual literacies, and cultural practices which reflect global mobility and the blended nature of their social worlds. For children such as the Latino first graders we have been working with for the past three years, their lived experiences do not easily align with one language or national affiliation. Our qualitative practitioner research study examines how emergent bilinguals in transnational contexts engage in critical inquiry through photographing and writing about their communities. Drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory, we explore how children's experiences in global neighborhood spaces--including their dynamic translanguaging practices and transnational histories--were an epistemic resource and a means of enacting agency. We suggest that translanguaging, as a cultural historical artifact, can help mediate children's critical inquiries into global childhoods.

Urban contexts where children with a range of abilities, languages, and cultures are served demand unique teacher preparation models. This study contends that ensuring unrestrictive learning environments in inclusive bilingual classrooms, where multiple educators work together, requires teachers to attend to division-of-labor. Informed by cultural historical activity theory, this article explores the kinds of division-of-labor dynamics surfacing in 35 multivoiced postlesson discussions. The focus on division-of-labor surfaced the need for teachers to collectively attend to students' learning while they "hold the center," and purposefully centering student agency. The analysis offers insight for the preparation of teachers for inclusive bilingual classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]