I approach this work with a translanguaging perspective, which normalizes the experiences and practices of bi/multilinguals. Translanguaging is a both a theory of language and a framework for teaching. In terms of the theory, translanguaging offers some important divergences from conventional thinking about language and language learning:
Translanguaging argues that language users have a single cognitive repertoire with all the features they use for communication from which they draw strategically. This is in contrast to notions of language that suggest people have separate repertoires for each of their languages or varieties.
Translanguaging argues that named languages and varieties ("English," "Spanish," "Academic Language," etc.) are social and political inventions. Rather, translingual perspectives highlight the ways that language practices evolve over time and shift across interactional contexts (notice how you shift your own speech based on who you talk to or what you talk about, for instance). While labeling specific sets of communicative features and practices as belonging to a named language/variety can help organize our thinking, it often also serves as a way to marginalize people whose languaging practices diverge from the norm of a monolingual user of any given "language."
The importance of these theoretical shifts lies in their implications for policy and pedagogy. If we recognize that named languages are a function of social systems that rely on language naming to distinguish among groups and often to place them in hierarchy (for example, settler colonialism claimed indigenous languages were inferior, and used this as a rationale for the linguistic and literal genocide against indigenous people), then we must organize our school programs and curriculum in ways that honor, nurture, and build upon our students' individual and community languaging practices. Below is an explanatory video from Prof. Ofelia García and the City University of New York - New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), whose materials will feature prominently across these modules.