Beyond the “Core” curriculum: expanding access to multilingual learners

Classrooms are becoming increasingly multilingual spaces (Lucas, Strom, Bratkovich, & Wnuk, 2018; Villegas, SaizdeLaMora, Martin, & Mills, 2018), but teachers continue to feel unprepared to meet the needs of multilingual learners (MLs) (Gomez & Diarrassouba, 2014; Hong, Keith, & Moran, 2019). Some teacher education and policy initiatives have been introduced to address this issue; for example, some states require teachers to complete coursework in teaching MLs (Leider, Colombo, & Nerlino, 2021). However, such initiatives are largely concentrated in the “core” academic areas of math, English language arts, history, and sciences – or the subjects whose preferential positioning is reflected in their prominent presence in school curricula and in their inclusion in standardized testing (e.g., Bunch, 2013; Coady, Harper, & De Jong, 2016; Merga, Mat Roni, & Mason, 2020; Ollerhead, 2018). In this issue, we take the stance that training for working with MLs should be inclusive of teachers in all academic areas, including subjects such as visual and dramatic arts, music, career and technology education, culinary arts, consumer science, physical education, and museum education. From a social justice stance, any teacher who has MLs in their classroom should be prepared to meet their needs (Tigert & Leider, 2021). In fact, equitable access to education and the curriculum, which includes instructional attention to the linguistics needs of MLs, is a civil right (NCELA, n.d.). Ignoring this imperative means MLs will continue to receive substandard instruction and fewer opportunities to access meaningful curriculum more broadly, compared to their more privileged peers. Indeed, there is evidence that even in the core subjects, MLs lack access to rigorous academic instruction (Callahan & Shifrer, 2016). Neglecting multilingual students’ needs in the broader content areas also fundamentally devalues these subjects and their teachers by ignoring the rich disciplinary language and literacy practices within these fields and by sending the message that it is not worth ensuring that all students can access their content. Art classes, for example, are often framed as “useless frills” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 2) and frequently positioned as a subject that MLs will “get” without extra support, as evidenced by newcomers often enrolled in the arts with their mainstream peers while being separated during core content instruction (Boyson & Short, 2003). This positioning ignores the fact that the arts have a disciplinary language of their own (Andrelchick, 2015; Frambaugh-Kritzer, Buelow, & Simpson Steele, 2015) and that MLs need specialized instruction to engage with content at a deeper level (Nutta, Mokhtari, & Strebel, 2012). This idea can be extended to all content areas beyond the core. Yet, at present, research literature aimed at improving the teaching of MLs that could inform teacher education and state policy focuses mainly on the “core” academic areas. The few published resources about preparing MLs in other content areas that do exist often describe ways to help MLs acquire the core content through the integration of the broader subject areas, instead of focusing on the curricular content of the broader subjects themselves (e.g., Anderson & Loughlin, 2014; Brouillette, 2012; Rieg & Paquette, 2009). This special issue addresses this gap, bringing together a set of articles that describe “evidence-based empirical research in classrooms populated by English