Supporting Multilingual Students from Policy to Practice: Systemic Initiatives to Create Equitable Career and Technical Education
This paper focuses on the need to provide systems of support for multilingual students in career and technical education (CTE) programs. The paucity of research on multilingual students’ access to, participation in, and outcomes from CTE and the lack of attention to issues of language in CTE teacher preparation has left CTE educators and administrators with little basis for imagining meaningful, research-based initiatives to support multilingual students. This paper describes an ongoing, equity-focused professional development initiative undertaken by a large regional CTE center to address the needs of emergent bilingual and advance equity in CTE programs. The program foregrounded professional development opportunities for teachers and administrators to ensure that equity is pursued on a systemic level. (An ad free version of this paper is available via subscription to the International Multilingual Research Journal.)