04/08/2026
Session Spotlight: “I Exist in Both Communities”: A Q***rCrit Portrait of Becoming a Q***r Bilingual Latino Teacher, presented by Patrick Lopez
Join us for this session at the fully online 2026 Iowa Symposium on English Language Teaching (ISELT) happening Friday, April 10! Learn more and register at uni.edu/iselt
Session Overview: This session explores how language, identity, family, and lived experience shape curriculum for multilingual learners through the framework of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Grounded in self-portraiture and Critical Race Theory (i.e., intersectionality and counterstorying), the presentation centers a pre-service teacher’s experiences as a first-generation, Latine, q***r, low-income undergraduate navigating white cisheteronormative expectations within teacher education at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. The session highlights how language is not only central to participation and learning, but also deeply connected to identity, belonging, and self-understanding. Attendees will engage with a practical example of how teachers can co-construct self-portraits with multilingual learners who hold layered identities, and how those portraits can help educators better understand students’ family contexts, interests, funds of knowledge, and community cultural wealth. The presentation offers concrete ways to design a curriculum that is more humanizing, reflective, and responsive to multilingual learners’ lives.
