"COVID has Brought Us Closer”: A Proleptic Approach to Understanding ESL Teachers' Practices in Supporting ELLs In and After the Pandemic

This paper uses "prolepsis,” a process of reaching into the past to inform present and future practices, to understand 12 English-as-a-second language (ESL) teachers' practices of supporting English language learners (ELLs) through remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020-2021 in British Columbia and to envision some different current and future post-pandemic classroom literacies for diverse learners. Accounts of these ESL teachers' synthetical moments of teaching and supporting ELLs during the pandemic suggest that they had to navigate "new” areas of teaching, including attending to students' social-emotional learning (SEL), connecting with ELL parents, teaching and engaging students via technology-supported instruction, and co-teaching with mainstream teachers, on the basis of limited or no pre-pandemic experience. These insights suggest a need to widen the focus on ESL teachers' knowledge and expertise in applied linguistics and instructional strategies to include classroom literacies in integrating SEL into ESL instruction, adopting interactive, student-driven instructional designs and practices afforded by multimodal technologies, maintaining multiple channels of communication with parents and students, and team-teaching with classroom teachers to provide tailored language support for ELLs.

In and Out of the Unknown: Lessons from Immigrant Families Promoting Multiliteracies During the COVID‐19 Pandemic

How has the COVID‐19 pandemic changed the home literacy environment, parental engagement, and home‐school communications for children and families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds? Data on the experiences of 231 Chinese‐Canadian immigrant families with K‐2 children revealed that emergency remote learning affected the home literacy environment in complex ways. While some experienced a decrease in mainstream language exposure, others also witnessed a decline in home language use and literacy engagement due to the closure of heritage language schools and absence of grandparents. Parents also differed in their ability, resources, and confidence level in supporting multiliteracies development at home during the pandemic. Moreover, there existed persistent barriers to effective home‐school communications despite the affordances of remote learning. The findings have important implications for both immigrant families and mainstream teachers in working collaboratively to support the children's needs in multiliteracies development. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Terminating the Intersectional Harm of Triple Pandemics for Asians: An Educational Imperative

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed three additional pandemics that Asians have been battling against historically: Anti-Asian racism, Sinophobia, and the model minority myth. These multiple pandemics are bringing intersectional harm to Asians in mental health, academic achievement, and alliance with other racialized groups. Being casted as the model minority, the "kung flu" and the "red scare" at the same time had prevented many educators from seeing Asian students' academic needs and strengths in non-academic areas, resulted in mental health crises and precluded Asians and other racial groups from forming interracial solidarity. It is imperative that we stop the hate and terminate the intersectional harm through addressing the knowledge gaps in Asian American/Canadian history and stereotypes in K-12 educational curriculum, supporting teacher education, and building racial alliances and solidarity among students of diverse racial backgrounds.