Language Goes To School

In this episode, we speak with Olivia Flores, a dynamic young bilingual educator from Chicago, who now calls herself a proud transplant to Kansas City, Missouri. Bilingual education in the heart of the Midwest? Well, yes. Of course! Due to recent increases in the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the Midwest, often due to the meat and poultry processing and home construction industries, the Midwest has experienced an impress...

Rafe Martinez didn’t become a leader in deaf education in New Mexico because he’s deaf. He’s not. He became a leader in deaf education because his son was born deaf, and Rafe and the rest of the family needed to communicate with him. But Rafe quickly discovered that American Sign Language, or ASL, is not just for deaf students and their families. It’s also for hearing students whose parents are deaf. These s...

Those who don't speak the dominant language of their region as their first language know all too well that language status—and the consequences of it—are real. Without being entirely conscious of it, all societies have developed language hierarchies that place some languages in positions of prestige, at or near the top of the hierarchy, while relegating other languages to positions of subordination, at or near the botto...

On this episode of Language Goes to School, we speak with Molly Arévalo, a lifelong educator and language learner, whose journey reflects the complexity of heritage language identity. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Molly was raised in an English-only household in the mainland U.S. She later worked intentionally to reclaim Spanish as an academic, professional, and personal language. She studied Spanish and Sociology at the Universit...

This is the true story of a boy we will call Ricardo, who was an enthusiastic young 4th grader in a Spanish-English dual-language classroom circa 2011. Due to circumstances completely beyond his control, Ricardo had by 4th grade essentially stopped speaking his native Spanish in favor of English. This was the case at school, where at least his preference for English was appropriate half the time. But it was also the case at home, w...

If you live in the United States and are familiar with only one decision handed down by a court of law, it’s probably the U.S. Supreme Court case known as Brown v. Board of Education. Specifically, that would be young Linda Brown, only nine years old when she sued her local Board of Education for sending her to an all-black school a mile and a half from her house, when there was a perfectly good white school right around the ...

In this episode, we visit with Ishtar Rosario Medina, whose educational and personal journey has spanned Puerto Rico, New York City, Mississippi, New Mexico, and now Minnesota. She was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the tradition of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in Manhattan and Queens. At the age of 7, she returned to the island. Six years later, her path took an unconventional turn when her father...

In this episode of Language Goes to School, we speak with Ina Montoya, lifelong educator, proud Jicarilla Apache (father’s side) and Navajo (mother’s side), and tireless advocate for the revitalization of Indigenous education in general, and Indigenous languages in particular. After years of teaching in the Dulce Independent School District of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, Ina recently served as the district's superinten...

It is entirely possible to draw a straight line from the advent of human flight, to the world’s largest hot-air balloon fiesta, and thence to Nancy Oakes, our guest for this episode. That’s because Nancy was a high school French teacher in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, neighbor city of Albuquerque, the undisputed modern hot-air balloon capital of the world. It was there she established herself as a cultural, linguistic, and h...

Bardo Trujillo first experienced the rush of the rapport between the rock guitarist and the audience in fourth grade, when he played The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin in the school talent show. In birdwatching jargon, this was his spark bird; for him, his spark performance. He was hooked. From there he took off on a lifelong career in music, specializing in classical, rock, metal, New Mexican, country, jazz, and pop. He holds a bachelo...

Nemiliztli means “life” in Náhuatl, the language of the Mexica people who inhabited Tenotitchlán, a beautiful city in the middle of beautiful Lake Texcoco. Mexico City stands there today. And “life” adequately describes the path Nemiliztli Trinidad Ortega followed to becoming a bilingual teacher. Her mother taught bilingual kindergarten in Los Angeles and started a doctoral program in bilingual education at ...

In this special episode of Language Goes to School, we investigate the blockbuster 1923 U.S. Supreme Court case Meyer v. Nebraska, in which parents won the right to “direct” the education of their children, even when their children are not home schooled, but attend the nation’s public and private schools. Recent surges in parents asserting their rights in schools have been evident in the years after the Covid pand...

“El agua es la vida,” states Adrián Sandoval, a native of northern New Mexico, where water is indeed life, but also much, much more. For hundreds if not thousands of years, Native peoples of the area have used complex systems of irrigation to produce a variety of foods in this high, dry desert. The Spanish arrived in the 16th century with their own designs on how to make the most of limited water supplies in the Southwe...

The relationship between doctor and patient is often delicate. When the doctor and patient speak two different languages, the relationship can be even more delicate and ripe for misunderstanding. Unless, of course, the doctor is bilingual and can communicate fluently with the patient, using non medical terminology the patient can understand. Dr. Shana Drake-Lavelle became bilingual in the 1990s by virtue of a nascent, elementary, d...

Maame Adofoah Yamoah informs us that, out of 54 countries on the African continent, only one, Equatorial Guinea, has established Spanish as the country’s official language. Maame is from Ghana, far to the west of Equatorial Guinea, where the colonial and official language is English and where virtually nobody in the country of 30 million people speaks Spanish. So, how did it happen that she’s a fluent speaker of Spanish...

Who decides which among many historical languages of a country gets to be the eponymous of the country? In the case of Spain, which is home to at least four widely spoken languages, as well as several others not as widely spoken, only Castellano (or Castilian in English) gets to use Spanish, literally, “the language of Spain,” as its international name. Why aren't Catalán, Gallego, or Euskera, called "Spanish" instead? ...

On March 1, 2025, the President of the United States signed one in a seeming endless stream of executive orders, or EOs, as they are often known. This EO ostensibly established English as the official language of the United States. This isn’t the first time people have tried to pull this off. There is a long history of such attempts. We explore those attempts, the legal weight of this EO and at least one other, and the implic...

Teachers often wonder aloud, or with other teachers, whatever became of this student or that. Most of the time we never know. So, on those rare occasions when we are able to fill the gap in the life of a student between, say, fifth grade and adulthood, it is often surprising and gratifying. That is certainly the case with Stephanie Zarrasola, whom I last saw as she left my 3rd-4th-5th grade dual-language classroom in May 2001 for m...

Humans have been multilingual for millennia. So have the various forms of education in which they’ve engaged. Modern trends toward bi- and multilingual education may seem new to some, but are actually a part of a much longer historical arc. Case in point: English-Spanish education at the Westminster-Juan Bautista Alberdi School in Buenos Aires, in which half of the academic subjects were taught in English and half in Spanish....