#980: Movers and Shakers: Immigrant Mothers as Architects of Language Education and Community Change

Scholarship has not attended much to how immigrant women learn new languages. We argue that the complex everyday constraints on immigrant women’s everyday agency throw in sharp relief moments when they insist on their own agendas for learning. We analyze ethnographic data of an ESL class we taught at a U.S. immigrant services center, exploring how immigrant mothers assert their needs and wants for curriculum, altering top-down educational power dynamics and transforming the learning environment.