Dan Heiman and Jenn Castillo
Speaker Bios
Dan Heiman
Dan Heiman is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education at the University of North Texas. A former bilingual teacher in El Paso and teacher educator at the University of Veracruz (México), his critical ethnographic research examines critical pedagogies, activism, and acompañamiento in dual language and bilingual teacher preparation contexts.
Jenn Castillo
Jenn Castillo is a Latina PhD student at the University of North Texas. She is a former dual language bilingual teacher with seven years of experience. Her current work is with preservice bilingual teachers around libros acompañantes that empower, humanize, and accompany racial minorities.
Libros acompañantes as platforms for critical consciousness in dual language classrooms
Day 1, Session 1 - July 25, 12:30-1:30pm
Libros acompañantes are books that acompañar the identities, realities, and experiences of Latinx emergent bilinguals and are an essential element in creating espacios in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) that foment the development of critical consciousness, which we argue should be the foundation of these programs. We will demonstrate how these libros acompañantes have been put into practice as part of a virtual collaboration between future bilingual teachers enrolled in the course “Latina/o/x Children’s and YA Literature” and 2 dual language classrooms and how they have been platforms for interrogating power, acompañamiento, and translanguaging.