Welcoming Refugees and Immigrants

This chapter highlights award-winning children's books that represent the lived experiences of immigrant, refugee, and transnational youth, particularly emphasizing their familial language practices such as translanguaging. Connections are made between the movement and resource sharing of plants and animals in nature to the movement of people, the connectedness of their languages, and the need for similar resource sharing among people. Not only do these books support inclusive teaching, but they also begin to normalize and legitimize these students' diverse experiences and language practices as valuable. Through interviewing an award-winning scholar and an award-winning teacher, who both create and integrate bilingual children's books that center the lives of children of color in their scholarship and teaching, the chapter underscores the powerful role books play in shaping perceptions through their language, imagery, and themes. The authors stress the importance of selecting classroom texts that authentically reflect the cultural and linguistic identities of students, especially newcomers and immigrants, and call for having critical language awareness conversations with students about books that fall short in reflecting their identities. To support this, the authors provide a linguistic typology of bilingual children's books that teachers can use to facilitate these critical conversations.