Strategizing assessment to support emerging bilingual students: a focus on the home language

Both educators and students in the United States feel the continuous pressure to improve achievement scores as a form of validation for their work and success. However, emerging bilingual (EBs) learners encounter barriers within assessments that break the assumptions of validity, reliability, and fairness and prevent them from demonstrating their true knowledge. This is worsened when assumptions about EBs' academic capacity are extracted from those assessment results. This paper focuses on the use of assessment for and as learning for emerging bilingual (EB) students. Specific attention is given to the use of the students' home language as a resource in evaluating their knowledge and how teachers may address some of the inequitable practices to prepare EBs not only to be successful academically, but to demonstrate it in today's assessment world.

Where Our Paths Crossed

This chapter presents the case of two Latina teachers who worked with Latinx and emerging bilingual students. Their funds of identity are analyzed, and the professional development program is described, including ways it influenced the teachers' ideological clarity and sense of agency. While their experiences were different in many ways, Summer and Ximena's paths crossed through their shared experiences in the professional development program, and they became vocal advocates for language as resource and language as right perspectives in education. This chapter demonstrates the potential in professional development for teachers working with emerging bilinguals and immigrants, how teachers can move towards advocacy work and leadership by examining their own journeys and funds of identity.