Towards Justice and Sociopolitical Well-Being in Language Education: Pedagogies de Cariño for (Bilingual) Latine Youth

About the talk

In this talk, Dr. Morales discusses her work (Morales & Saravia, 2019) and that of other scholars that identify the importance of care (Valenzuela, 1999) or cariño (Curry, 2016; Lomelí, 2023) as crucial for nondominant students of color. Morales and Saravia address the importance of demonstrating affection to students, but more importantly, working toward the sociopolitical well-being of Latine youth, who are often at various stages of engaging in new linguistic communities of practice (e.g., English, Spanish, Spanglish, etc.)

Morales argues that just as a “social turn” took place in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Block, 2003), and a sociopolitical turn in mathematics (Gutiérrez, 2013) and science education, so must a sociopolitical turn be acknowledged as vital in the area of language education.

About the speaker

Dr. Zitlali Morales is a Professor of Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education and affiliated faculty of the Latin American and Latino Studies program at UIC. Lali is the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents from Jalisco, México. She grew up in Illinois and received a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University and PhD in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research focuses on the linguistic practices of Latina/o/x/e bilinguals, the language ideologies of immigrant communities, language education policy, and increasing equitable access to dual language bilingual education for Latina/o/x/e and other racialized communities. She works to decenter whiteness in teacher preparation via language education and has documented the testimonios of Latina/o/x teachers in Chicago with her research team.