Disrupting the Monolingual Bias

Dr. Lillian Ardell is a speaker, coach, and the founder of Language Matters, LLC, an educational consulting firm. As a sociolinguist and trained qualitative researcher, she blends theory, practice, and adult learning principles to design transformative activities and coaching cycles focused on equity and teacher empowerment. Known for her engaging style, she incorporates humor, poetry, and even dance into her presentations. Disrupting the Monolingual Bias is her first book and represents a significant effort to challenge mainstream, deficit perspectives about bilingual learners. Visit her website to learn more: www.languagematters.org.

Foreword by Margo Gottlieb Preface - Why Advocacy? Part 1: Build your Knowledge Base Chapter 1: Introducing the Monolingual Bias Lesson Plan: Take the Small Brave Movements Quiz Chapter 2: Bilingual Education is a Social Justice Issue Chapter 3: Sociolinguistics Matter Lesson Plan: Sociolinguistics by Lang Proficiency: Friends or Foes? Chapter 4: Teaching Language Ideologies Lesson Plan: The White Listening Subject Part 2: Disruption Stories Chapter 5: Disruptor Archetypes Chapter 6: Success Stories Lesson Plan: I'm the type of advocate who... Chapter 7: Bummer Stories Lesson Plan: Equity in Bilingual Education Looks Like... Chapter 8: Redemption Stories Lesson Plan: If I could change one thing in bilingual education, it would be... Part 3: Your Marching Orders Chapter 9: Doable Disruptions to the Monolingual Bias Lesson Plan: Advice for the Next Generation of Disruptors

"A true awakening for all teachers who work with multilingual learners and their families. Ardell passionately defends multilingualism from a personal, collective, and institutional stance. This is a volume that should not sit on a bookshelf but rather inspire you to rethink spaces for infusing multilingualism in your context and join the compelling cause of Disrupting the Monolingual Bias." -- Margo Gottlieb "This book provides vivid examples through metaphors and stories to showcase how biases impact our students of color. It gives educators the tools we need to feel empowered to disrupt inequities and create safe, inclusive, unbiased spaces for our students who sometimes depend on our voices as their only hope of advocacy." -- Luz E. Rivera Rodriguez "As I read Disrupting the Monolingual Bias, I remembered the six-year-old version of me that entered a U.S. schooling system speaking only Spanish. With each page turn, I revisited the linguistic trauma that was inflicted upon me by the educators charged to teach me, in their quest to get me to learn English and assimilate quickly. This book is a must-read for anyone serving culturally and linguistically diverse student communities. By weaving research with the very personal, transparent, and inspiring anecdotes of leaders in our field, Dr. Ardell manages to illuminate the continued harms of linguistic oppression, while also providing needed tools to engage in the courageous dismantling of educational systems that continue to marginalize some of our most vulnerable students." -- Dr. Jose Medina "Disrupting the Monolingual Bias is engaging and readable. It is often written that culture is what we USE to see but seldom what we ACTUALLY SEE. The same can be said of the monolingual bias in schools. In this book, Dr. Ardell has concretely defined the monolingual bias and then presented in great detail examples of these bias in school contexts, district policies and classrooms, enabling readers to not only SEE monolingual bias but also decide how to address it in school contexts with multilingual learners. The book does not sugar-coat the challenges presented when addressing the monolingual bias, but lays out a powerful rationale for why addressing these issues is imperative in the evolution of bilingual/dual language education." -- Kathy Escamilla