As the number of students designated as Multilingual Learners (MLs) continues to grow, educators must think critically about how best to support them. This hands-on guide introduces critical advocacy and explores how its effectiveness is tied to educators' critical awareness of themselves, their broader political contexts, and their daily school-based work with MLs.

The authors use a tree metaphor to represent the importance of roots (identities, beliefs, and ideologies); the trunk (core critical advocacy beliefs); branches (areas of critical advocacy action); and off-shoots and leaves (local critical advocacy action). Throughout, there are features such as Voices From the Field and Digging In, which invite readers to consider concepts from the text in their own lives, contexts, and practices. At the end of the book, the authors provide a Critical Advocacy Action Planning Tool to help readers plan for critical advocacy in their own context.

Whether you already see yourself as an advocate or are new to this work, this book will help you develop a critical advocacy stance and cultivate the practices and dispositions needed to engage in meaningful, sustainable, and effective advocacy with and for MLs in your school, classroom, and community.

Rebecca E. Linares began working with multilingual students and families through after-school programming for refugee and immigrant K-8 students in Kentucky. Her research examines the transnational literacy and translanguaging practices of emergent multilingual adolescents. She is currently an associate professor in the ESL/Bilingual Education program at Rowan University in New Jersey.

Kate Seltzer got her start in education as a high school English Language Arts teacher in New York City. She is co-author of the book The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning, and her research overall focuses on critical, asset-oriented approaches to educating MLs. She is an associate professor in the ESL/Bilingual Education program at Rowan University in New Jersey.