BILINGUAL EDUCATION: Leaving (and Not Leaving) Race and Disability Behind

This chapter first presents the ways in which bilingual education moved from being an anti-racist endeavor to one that focused on the teaching of language, with a lack of attention to anti-racism, the profound absence of African, Asian, and Native Americans, and the invisibility of Afro-Latinx, Asian-Latinx, and Indigenous-Latinx representation. We discuss how recent theories of critical race/disability, raciolinguistic ideologies, and translanguaging have turned the attention of bilingual education scholars and educators toward building programs that represent, and include all, while enacting an anti-racist, anti-ableist, language-inclusive stance that leads to more social equity. We describe our understandings of critical-race-informed translanguaging theory and its implications for pedagogical practices. We end by discussing pedagogical practices of classroom interaction that promote inclusion, representation of all, and meaningful interactions among diverse groups, while making bilingualism a possibility for all.