Episode 1_ No Sabo podcast_ A Space for reflection and disruption of Bilingual Education

The No Sabo podcast discusses the importance of bilingual education, emphasizing the value of language, identity, and resistance. The host, Annalilia, shares her personal experience of learning Spanish from her mother as a tool for empowerment and belonging. She advocates for trans-languaging, a fluid approach to using languages in education, and highlights the need for culturally responsive and equitable bilingual programs. The podcast challenges educators and districts to move beyond assimilationist approaches towards transformative practices that honor students' languages and cultures. Welcome to the No Sabo podcast, a space for reflection and disruption in bilingual education. I am your host, Annalilia, and today I want to start not with the theory, but with the memory, a memory that is the foundational theory of my life. It begins when I was around four years old and had just recently arrived in this country. My first classroom wasn't a crowded public school building in Brooklyn, but a kitchen table. I sit at the humilde table, beneath the white light fluorescent and frail. Four years old, a new language I inhale, but not the one the world outside would easily enable. My mother's hand, a guide on the page, traces the accent sharp and profound. This is la mesa, this is sagrado, y por cual valorado, a space where my history will engage. Spanish is the window to the outside air, for capitalism, for school, for the city's wide roar. But Spanish is the door to something more, a language of belonging beyond all. She taught me the difference, resist and exist, to hold the two, not a division, but a sign that my heritage is valuable and mine, a quiet revolutionary act in the making. My mother's lesson had a profound purpose. She wasn't just teaching me to speak a language, she was giving me the tools not just to speak, but to exist. She taught me the undeniable value of my heritage, that my culture was not a thing to be compartmentalized or checked at the school door. And perhaps most importantly, she taught me the value of resistance, resistance to the expectation that I should forget my first language, resistance to the lie that speaking one language makes you whole and makes you divided, delayed, and therefore a deficit. In a system that often promotes assimilation, a system I would later enter as both a student and now a teacher, my mother's insistence on Spanish was a quiet revolutionary act. It was the genius of my identity and the first critical framework I've ever learned, that language is resistance. This is the lens through which I view every aspect of bilingual education, and it's what drives me to ask the critical questions that move us from personal memory to public action. For the educators listening, are we simply teaching two languages, or are we truly honoring the full, dynamic, multilingual human being at the heart of our classrooms? For the parents listening, does your child's school see their home language as a tool to be replaced, or as a resource to be treasured? The answer to those questions are what forces us to turn to the warm light of that kitchen table and look directly into the systems that are built. What happens when the classroom fails to be as revolutionary as a mother's lesson? The challenges in our school are not a matter of student failure, they're a matter of systemic failure, and we have the framework to understand why. In New York City, the dual-language bilingual education model is often highly structured. You use English in one class or in one time, a specific time, and Spanish in another. The reality in my school, which serves over a thousand students with just one single bilingual teacher, demonstrates the failure of a strict, separated interpretation. The lack of resources means those classes often, by de facto, become monolingual English environments, and the minority language, Spanish, is practically non-existent. This failure is exactly what the dual-language bilingual education in New York City was critiqued by Garcia, as critiqued by Garcia in 2018, warned us about. The solution, the practice that truly reflects what my mother did at home, is what Garcia calls trans-languaging. It is not about letting students use two separate tools, it's about recognizing that they use one fluid linguistic repertoire. It is a dynamic reality of a student's brain in action. My mother modeled this when she wove La Mesa into my English-speaking world. In our classrooms, trans-languaging means we stop asking students to divide themselves, divide their thinking, divide their languages, and instead encourage them to use their entire linguistic genius to make meaning of a content or of a critical concept. The traditional view, which is a separation of languages, often fails, and it artificially builds these two times that students can use their languages, and ways that students can make meaning. Again, it's done artificially, it's done with structure, when language doesn't work that way. Language is like trans-languaging, as explained, is using language in a very fluid way in your mind, and embracing that to understand and make deep-meaning connections with the content. To be truly effective, bilingual education must do more than teach language skills. It must build onto identity, intellect, and criticality as defined by Dr. Goldie-Muhammad's Historically Responsive Literacy framework. Bilingual models often treat bilingual students as needing remediation, or a gap to be filled in English skills, or lacking of. This misses the huge potential of authentic bilingual education. Dr. Muhammad's work pushes us to see the genius. The four pillars of Historically Responsive Literacy are identity, which affirms and builds on students' personal and cultural heritage, it is skill development, which is what we know as standards, it is intellectualism, which is promoting deeper thinking and complex knowledge building, and it is criticality, where students understand and analyze power, equity, and oppression in their world and in the text they read. It teaches students to question, challenge, and act for justice. Identity directly links to my mother's efforts to teach me the value of my heritage. A responsive bilingual program must actively center the history, culture, and resistance of Latinx communities, rather than marginalizing it and acting as if it doesn't exist. Criticality is another pillar that helps students analyze the very power structures that lead to a lack of bilingual educators in a majority Latinx school. This moves the education from simply absorbing information to actively understanding and challenging inequity. Finally, the resource gap in the resulting English-only classrooms at my school are not accidental. They are evidence of the continuation of assimilationist visions that are critiqued in the Tale of Two Visions many years ago. The text provides the theoretical explanation for why assimilationist visions persist. The lack of resources, or in my case, one teacher over a thousand students, demonstrates that the system by default is aimed at closing equity gaps by making students' English dominant and not truly bilingual, bicultural. A transformative vision, a radical vision, by contrast, uses the home language to foster empowerment and deep learning, seeing it as an asset, not a temporary tool to be discarded. It is seen as building active activists instead of just passive learners who are just absorbing information or assimilating to a culture. It is challenging. It is building people who can challenge and critique the system in order to make it better. What does this mean for teachers, schools, and districts? Well, for starters, for the teachers, it means to stop policing language separation. Encourage students to use their full linguistic repertoire, English, language, Russian, Arabic, all of them, in discussions and in the writing process to deepen their understanding of the content. It is also a call for us to review our curriculum and ask, how are assessments and projects uplifting and tapping into all of our students' language toolboxes? I'll be sharing a rubric of a project I was working on. It's an oral history project about immigration, and this rubric, you can see how it encourages translanguaging as a tool to make deeper connections and between languages. So, it is also important for us as teachers to see ourselves, not just teachers of content, but teachers of language. It's also another moment to reflect and to choose wisely the text and the projects that actively reflect the history, culture, and resistance of the students in our room. This is how we build powerful identity and create a responsive curriculum. For districts, district leaders, and schools, you must move beyond the assimilation decision. If you call it a dual language program, you must staff it accordingly. That means hiring and retaining highly qualified bilingual educators and investing in Spanish language materials that are culturally relevant, building onto school libraries. The goal is not English fluency. The goal is bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism for empowerment. We must look at our staffing, our budgets, and our professional development to ask, is this action driven by assimilation or by transformation? My mother taught me that language is resistance. It is a teacher's duty to ensure that the classroom is not a place where the resistance is broken, but a space where it's nurtured, celebrated, and translated into a powerful, educated voice. Thank you for joining me today. I'll leave you with one final question to consider. What is the revolutionary act your school is performing today?