Centering Multilingual Learners in School Curriculum through Community Asset Mapping

“Looking at multilingual learners through the lens of deficits is an all-toocommon perspective among educators and others. In Centering Multilingual Learners in School Curriculum Through Community Asset Mapping: A Practical Guide for Teachers, Ching Ching Lin and Huseyin Uysal provide evidence-based and practical strategies to, instead, focus on the many, many assets multilingual students bring to the table and how to leverage them for increased learning and a greater sense of belonging and community. What’s not to love!”

—Larry Ferlazzo, co-author of The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox 2.0 and Education Week teacher advice columnist

“This book is a masterful work of pedagogy meeting praxis. Many educators strive to center the assets of multilingual learners, but this is often difficult to achieve in practice. Lin and Uysal offer a practical path forward—not just to centering multilingual learners in the abstract, but providing a framework for achieving this learner-centeredness in schools and beyond. Every student deserves to have their culture, language, and lived experience honored in educational spaces. This book is a gift to teachers, teacher educators, and the multilingual learners they serve.”

—Chris K. Chang-Bacon, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development

“The authors’ asset-based focus on Community Asset Mapping (CAM) is a crucially important and needed perspective for supporting teachers who work with multilingual students (MLLs). The humanizing and action-oriented approach in this beautifully written book is a valuable resource for teachers and teacher educators of MLLs, and one that I look forward to using in my work!”

—Megan Madigan Peercy, PhD., Professor, Applied Linguistics & Language Education, University of Maryland

“The authors articulate how to expand the learning experience expected by the conceptual shifts in education policy developed for minoritized student groups. Educators seeking topics on culturally responsive teaching will find pedagogical support for the concept of Community Asset Mapping and practical classroom tools for all students, especially multilingual learners. The book invites educators, students, and communities to co-create knowledge by seeing the wealth of assets these students bring into the classroom.”

—Okhee Lee, PhD., Professor, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University

“Centering Multilingual Learners in School Curriculum Through Community Asset Mapping: A Practical Guide for Teachers functions as a mechanism for returning the long-standing repertoires of multilingual learners from the periphery to the center of the educational research and teaching enterprise. Reflecting a collective commitment to Community Asset Mapping (CAM) that disrupts deficit discourse, this book creates imaginaries of possibility that rely on community-based knowledge as fundamental to the liberation of multilingual assets in classrooms. Classroom teachers in our currently expanding multilingual world will find the affordances for digital resourcefulness presented indispensable to empowering and mobilizing schools and communities for social change.”

—Patriann Smith, Professor of Literacy Studies, University of South Florida, and Author of Black Immigrant Literacies: Intersections of Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom

Foreword
David E. Kirkland

Chapter 1
Introduction to Community Asset Mapping: What, Why, and How

Chapter 2
Fostering Culturally Responsive Teacher Identity and Co-Learning Stance

Chapter 3
From Culturally Responsive Pedagogy to Community Asset Mapping as a Framework of Co-Learning

Chapter 4
Community Asset Mapping as a Pedagogy of Co-Learning: Methods, Processes, and Tools

Chapter 5
Community-Based Approach to Community Asset Mapping

Chapter 6
Digital Creativity Approach to Community Asset Mapping

Chapter 7
Inquiry-Based Approach to Community Asset Mapping

Chapter 8
Community Asset Mapping as a Planning, Reflection, and Collaborative Tool

Appendix

About the Authors

Index

Ching-Ching Lin

Dr. Ching-Ching Lin is a teacher educator specializing in TESOL and Bilingual Education at Adelphi University, New York. Originally from Taiwan, Dr. Lin has held leadership roles across local, national, and international teacher organizations. These include serving as Past Chair of the Bilingual-Multilingual Education Interest Section (B-MEIS) (2020–2021) and President of NYS TESOL (2022–2023), along with numerous positions within TESOL International. She is also the founder and director of a teacher education initiative grounded in co-learning and cultural humility, designed to empower educators in supporting multilingual learners through culturally responsive teaching practices. Dr. Lin’s research focuses on leveraging diversity as a catalyst for meaningful and transformative change. She has published extensively on topics related to diversity and inclusion. Dr. Lin is a co-editor and contributing author of three influential volumes: Inclusion, Diversity, and Intercultural Dialogue in Young People's Philosophical Inquiry, Internationalization in Action: Leveraging Diversity and Inclusion in the Globalized Classroom, and Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language, and Power.

Huseyin Uysal

Huseyin Uysal, Ph.D. is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language Education at The Education University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD degree in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in ESOL/Bilingual Education from the University of Florida. His scholarship is driven by the values of social justice and grounded in understanding power, identity, and inclusivity in linguistically and culturally diverse schools. His research interests, which tie back to several of his current endeavors, are primarily centered on criticality in TESOL teacher education, and plurilingualism at public schools. He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Education for Multilingualism, and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology.