Acknowledgments
It is always interesting to see how simple ideas blossom into manuscripts and how manuscripts become realized in books. If it wasn’t for the confidence that Corwin places in its authors, it couldn’t have been able to position itself as such a stronghold in the educational field and a voice of advocacy for the teaching force. We applaud its ongoing commitment to seeking new ideas and inspiration for bettering education opportunities for students and educators.
Dan Alpert, program director of equity and professional learning, embodies this trust. He is a true champion of equity, and we can’t thank him enough for believing in this project and in us. With the support of Maura Sullivan, marketing manager, this dynamic duo has a clear vision of how to conceptualize and communicate the importance of promoting educational change through the power of language. We also cannot forget Kimberly Greenberg, senior associate editor, who, in the team spirit, is always willing to help in any way.
Other important Corwin folks have contributed to bringing our book to fruition. Katie Crilley, editorial assistant, is a detail person who has meticulously combed the manuscript to ensure that it complies with publishing guidelines. Marketing plays an important role in informing the educational community of the upcoming addition to the field, and Kimberly Schmidt, marketing associate, has worked feverishly to help publicize our book. Gail Buschman has taken our ideas for the cover and converted them to represent the strength of language power. Lastly, we extend our gratitude to Melanie Birdsall, senior project editor, Books Production, who has led the way to converting a manuscript into a book and to Jared Leighton, our copy editor, who helped us polish our text, figures, and resources to ready them for you.
There are two organizations to whom we are greatly indebted. The first, BrainPOP®, has generously offered its myriad resources to assist us in concretizing how key uses of academic language can be operationalized through multimodal, content-based materials. Beverly Fine, as editorial and outreach director of BrainPOP ESL™, clearly sees the value of connecting language and content. She has been an advocate on our behalf and has supported us in securing the digital materials we proudly display that you, the reader, can digitally access. Last but not least, WIDA, our home away from home, has given us the latitude and confidence to take a spark of an idea, explore it in depth with colleagues and experts, grapple with how to represent it, and share its product with educators. With encouragement and collaboration of many wonderful WIDAites in Madison, Wisconsin, across the country, and around the globe, our dreams have become reality. For this and more, we are eternally grateful for WIDA, the many friendships it has personally spurred, and its dedication to equitable education for language learners worldwide.
We dedicate this book to our children—Graham, Amy, Andrés, and Diego—and to all children around the world who have the power to realize the potential of language.
Dedicamos nuestro libro a nuestros hijos y a los niños alrededor del mundo quienes poseen el poder de realizar el potencial del lenguaje.
Preface
The basic purpose of school is achieved through communication.
—Courtney Cazden (2001)
If communication is the vehicle for school achievement, how can we change the educational mindset so that every educator sees language as a tool for attaining this goal? That’s what we have set out to accomplish in this book: to present a conceptual tool that is centered on overarching purposes for academic language use. It may appear simplistic, but we and our colleagues have spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to distill the complexities of language learning into a manageable set of key uses. So read the passage below on nutritional guidelines, from the FYI section of BrainPOP®’s “Nutrition” topic, and try to identify what they might be.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been giving out nutritional guidelines since the early 1900s. Its first standardized recommendations came in 1956, when it introduced the Basic Four Food Groups: grains; fruits and vegetables; dairy products; and a catchall protein category.
In 1992, the USDA decided to display its nutrition guidelines in the form of a pyramid. The shape of the original pyramid, which had six food groups instead of four, was ideal for showing the proportions of servings needed from each group to create a balanced diet. For instance, grains, which we need most, were at the base, while sweets and fats, which we should only occasionally snack on, were at the top.
Over the years, however, many nutritionists and doctors claimed that the food guide had a number of flaws. Eventually, as part of an overall campaign to get people to make healthier food choices, the USDA decided to revise and update the pyramid—and in 2005, the new and improved “MyPyramid” was unveiled.
The horizontal wedges of the original pyramid were replaced with vertical slices of various colors and thicknesses. Each represented the recommended number of daily servings from six different food groups: grains, vegetables, fruits, milk, meat andbeans, and oils. To remind people about the importance of exercise, a staircase was added to the left side of the pyramid, with a stick figure climbing the steps to good health.
But MyPyramid was also criticized for being too abstract—people didn’t know what group each colored wedge stood for. So the MyPlate logo was introduced in 2011, and officially unveiled by First Lady Michelle Obama.
“We realized we needed something that made sense not just in classrooms or laboratories, but at dinner tables and school cafeterias. We needed something useful, something simple,” Mrs. Obama said. Many nutritionists agreed, noting that people tend to eat off of plates, not pyramids!
Source: BrainPOP®, https://www.brainpop.com/health/nutrition/nutrition/fyi/#tab=0
Source: BrainPOP®, https://www.brainpop.com/health/nutrition/nutrition/fyi
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