Designing Critical Multilingual Multiliteracies Projects in Two-Way Immersion Classrooms: Affordances and Impacts on Students

Language separation policies in two-way bilingual education (TWBE) reflect ideologies of double monolingualism (Heller, 1995) and ignore the sociolinguistic realities of bi/multilingual students (García & Lin, 2017). This case study investigates the design and implementation of collaborative multilingual identity text projects (Prasad, 2018) in a Spanish-English two-way immersion (TWI) school. Identity text pedagogies (Cummins & Early, 2011) that engage bilingual students in creating dual-language multimodal texts have been taken up across a wide variety of contexts. Few studies in the United States, however, have examined how TWI teachers can use multiliteracies pedagogy (New London Group, 1996) with a critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) focus to move beyond the frame of Spanish-English through the creation of collaborative multilingual and multimodal class books. A thematic analysis of classroom data from our case study demonstrates that implementing critical multilingual multiliteracies projects fostered students’ CMLA while building positive bi/multilingual identities, leveraged students’ linguistic repertoires beyond the language of instruction, and encouraged linguistic risk-taking. This empirical study highlights the possibilities for adopting a collaborative, critical, and creative multilingual multiliteracies approach in TWI settings.


Designing Critical Multilingual Multiliteracies Projects in Two-Way Immersion Classrooms: Affordances and Impacts on Students
In the context of the unprecedented transnational movement of people by choice, need, or force, an increasing number of students in schools across North America come from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds.As these students bring a richness of different cultures and languages from their families and communities, the increasing diversity necessitates that schools address the specific needs of these students (García & Flores, 2013;Payant & Galante, 2022).In response, schools and teachers have to reconsider how programs and pedagogies take into account students' complex intersectional identities and their dynamic communicative practices.Teaching practices informed by multimodality and multiliteracies support the meaning-making processes of students from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds and their creative use of semiotic resources (Early & Kendrick, 2020;Jewitt, 2008;Pacheco et al., 2021).
Bilingual education in the United States context has been a site of political struggle for minoritized linguistic communities (Baker & Wright, 2017;Ovando, 2003).In recent years, certain states, including California and Arizona, have prohibited instruction in languages other than English, even for bi/multilingual students.While there is a range of bilingual programs offered throughout the country, the most common offer instruction in Spanish and English.These programs range from transitional models which support students in Spanish as they are acquiring English to two-way bilingual education (TWBE) models including two-way immersion (TWI) programs.TWI programs were initially designed to serve language minoritized students while providing opportunities for language majority students to learn another language (Fortune & Tedick, 2008).Yet, there have been growing critiques of TWI programs as critical scholars argue the programs are increasingly focused on the needs of language majority students and no longer serve their original purpose to support bilingual language development for students who speak languages other than English at home (de Jong, 2016;Flores & García, 2013).
Often, TWI programs follow a policy of language separation that allocates certain instructional times for English-only and others for the Language Other than English (e.g., Spanish or French) (Howard, 2002).While the strict language separation policy in TWI programs is meant to protect the minoritized languages (de Jong et al., 2019), a growing body of scholarship has questioned the strict boundaries of two educational spaces in TWI programs and argues to go beyond the monoglossic ideology of bilingualism to a holistic understanding of bilingualism (Flores & Schissel, 2014;García & Lin, 2017;Sánchez et al., 2018).With an increasingly diverse student population in TWI programs, there is a growing need to also attend to students' complex and intersectional identities as more than Spanish-English bilinguals (Chaparro, 2019;Frieson 2019;Hamman, 2018;Hamman-Ortiz, 2019;Martin-Beltrán, 2010;Martinez et al, 2017;Sánchez et al., 2018).
Multilingual project-based learning and multilingual language awareness projects have been taken up across a variety of international contexts, including but not limited to Europe (Hélot et al., 2018) and Canada (Cummins & Early, 2011;Galante, 2020;Lau & Van Viegen, 2020;Payant & Maatouk, 2022), as a way of affirming students' identities and literacy expertise.Language portraits, a multimodal autobiographic method to explore students' perception of their language experiences and language repertoires (Busch, 2006(Busch, , 2010;;Jasor, et al., 2022;Krumm & Jenkins, 2001;Prasad, 2014;Soares et al., 2020), are an example of a powerful multilingual and multimodal approach to help children represent their diverse linguistic identities.Implementing multilingual multiliteracies projects in classrooms provides ways for students to understand others' linguistic and cultural practices and raise their multilingual language awareness.However, there has been little research in TWI settings on projects that purposefully move beyond the frame of Spanish-English bilingualism to include other home, community, and indigenous languages.To address this gap, this two-year ethnographic study conducted in K-2 Spanish-English TWI classrooms at La Nueva Escuela Bilingüe (pseudonym) examined how teachers created linguistically expansive spaces (Hamman-Ortiz & Prasad, 2022;Prasad, 2021) for all learners by designing and implementing multiliteracies projects (Cope & Kalantiz, 2009;New London Group, 1996) with an explicit focus on building critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) (García, 2017).

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on two main theoretical perspectives: multiliteracies pedagogy and CMLA.In this study, multiliteracies is used as a comprehensive term that encompasses multimodal meaning-making and learning (Kalantzis & Cope, 2005).We begin by discussing how designing multiliteracies pedagogies creates spaces of encounter for students to bring their dynamic multilingual repertoires into their work at school for collaborative meaning-making and relationship-building.Next, we outline how adopting a CMLA focus on multilingual multiliteracies projects supports teachers and students, not only to develop bi-/multilingual literacies, but also to raise their critical consciousness about languages, language users, and in the process of language learning.In our case study, we draw on multiliteracies and CMLA perspectives to consider the affordances of designing multilingual multiliteracies projects that foster students' criticality, creativity, and collaboration in TWI classrooms.

Multiliteracies and Multimodality
Traditionally, literacy has been understood as the ability to understand a written linguistic system or as the ability to apply writing skills and written codes (Barton, 2007).In the 21st century, the widespread use of digital media to communicate and learn, as well as the multilingual communication between culturally and linguistically diverse learners, led scholars to call for a new approach to traditional concepts and pedagogy of literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009;García et al., 2007;Jewitt, 2008;Pahl & Roswell, 2005).The multiliteracies approach, initially proposed by the New London Group (1996), with its focus on multimodality, extends the traditional language-based and print-based approach by including multiple modes of meaning-making and communication.At the heart of the pedagogy of multiliteracies is the concept of 'designing' social futures which foregrounds how students are both users and producers of texts of different kinds across modes and languages.Literacy practices have indeed become increasingly multifaceted, multimodal, and multilingual (Anstey & Bull, 2005;Cummins & Early, 2011;Mills, 2011;Rowsell & Pahl, 2007;Smith & Axelrod, 2019;Werner & Todeva, 2022).Meaning-making takes place through a process of "design" that involves drawing upon available resources through an active and dynamic process of selecting to create specific meaning.The notion of design refers to "how people make use of the resources that are available at a given moment in a specific communicational environment to realize their interests as makers of a message/text" (Kress & Jewitt, 2003, p.17).When creating compositions that include sound, image, graphics, and video, findings suggest that creating multimodal compositions motivates students as writers and scaffolds their writing skills (Chisholm & Trent, 2013;Dalton, 2013).
Just as students draw on their communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2014) across different contexts and for different purposes, their literacy practices in and out of school contexts vary and their meaning-making is integrative rather than separated or singular (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).Mills (2006) has argued that a pedagogy of multiliteracies "draws attention to how learners are both inheritors of patterns and conventions for making meaning and active designers of new meanings" (p.133).We understand designing to refer both to the process and the product: the design process involves combining resources for meaning-making and engaging in creative production to critically re-design and redefine literacies as multilingual and multimodal.
While empirical work on multiliteracies pedagogy has tended to focus on leveraging digital technologies in the classroom, our focus within the context of TWI has been on developing multilingual multiliteracies projects for students to draw on both their understanding of the languages of instruction as well as other languages and variations from an integrative perspective.Designing collaborative multilingual multiliteracies projects creates a space of encounter for students of different linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds to engage in linguistic and cultural collaboration (Prasad & Lory, 2020) to leverage their collective resources and accomplish work together that they could not do alone.

Identity Texts: A Multiliteracies Pedagogy
The creation of "identity texts," a concept introduced Cummins as a pedagogy for supporting and affirming bilingual students' identities as "intelligent, imaginative, and linguistically talented" (Cummins & Early, 2011, p. 4), provides a platform for students to invest their identities in their work at school.Creating an identity text which can be written, spoken, visual, or combinations in multimodal forms allows students to draw on the full expanse of their communicative repertoires and to leverage their multilingual expertise (Cummins, 2009) for their learning.More recently, Prasad (2018) extended this idea to propose collaborative multilingual identity text projects as a "2.0 remix" of identity texts that purposefully brings together students of different language backgrounds to encounter one another's languages and local (Indigenous) languages, as well as to deepen their understanding of the language(s) of instruction, as they collaboratively produce multilingual and multimodal texts across the curriculum.Settings such as TWI in which students are learning through two instructional languages can offer a ripe context to engage all students in collaborative multilingual identity projects if boundaries separating languages in the classroom are softened.

Critical Multilingual Language Awareness
Within the context of TWI, we have also purposefully adopted CMLA as the focal lens informing the design of multilingual multiliteracies projects.CMLA also served as a framework to shape teachers' practices with respect to their emerging critical perspective of bi/multilingualism.Language Awareness (LA) has traditionally focused on teachers' and learners' explicit knowledge about language and metalinguistic skills.CMLA extends the notion of LA and Critical Language Awareness (CLA) (Fairclough, 1992) to examine individuals' sensitivity to languages, cultures, and power relations operating among them and their speakers (García, 2017;Garrett & Cots, 2018;Prasad & Lory, 2020).According to García (2017), by fostering CMLA, educators "become empowered to become activists so that all students are educated equitably" (p.263).As part of the CMLA framework, García (2017) identified six components for the development of critical multilingual awareness for teachers: (a) knowledge of (proficiency), (b) knowledge about (subject matter), (c) pedagogical practice, (d) awareness of plurilingualism and merits for democratic citizenship, (e) awareness of histories of colonial and imperialistic oppression, and (f) awareness that language is socially created and socially changeable.By engaging in CMLA projects, educators develop an additional understanding that "language is socially created and thus, socially changeable to give voice and educate all students equitably" (García, 2017, p. 263).The goal of targeting CMLA for learners is not necessarily for them to become proficient in multiple languages but rather to develop openness towards linguistic and cultural diversity and to become comfortable navigating multilingual environments and relationships.This shift exclusively from proficiency to openness is significant because it makes it possible for all learners and teachers, regardless of their linguistic and cultural background, to develop CMLA.For example, while teachers and students may not develop proficiency in Indigenous languages per se, they can develop a critical consciousness of their speakers, their histories (of colonization), and revitalization as an act of reconciliation.Recent scholarship suggests that simply being exposed to multiple languages enhances young children's language awareness and communication skills (Liberman et al., 2017).These findings among preschoolers suggest that elementary students may also derive social and academic benefits from purposefully leveraging the diverse linguistic repertoires that students bring to the classroom.

Towards Critical Multilingual Multiliteracies
Recent research has considered the construction of classroom spaces to allow students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires (Bettney, 2022;de Jong, 2016;de Jong et al., 2019;Kalan, 2022;Prada, 2022;Sánchez et al., 2018), yet few studies have explored specifically how to create classroom spaces that support the development of CMLA in Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Special Issue, 25, 3 (2022): 1-32   6 TWI programs.Thus, in this study, in partnership with early elementary teachers, students, and their families, we explored the following research question: how does engaging in critical multilingual multiliteracies projects impact students' language practice and identity negotiation?

Context
The case study at La Nueva Escuela Bilingüe (LNEB) was part of a larger researchpractice partnership (RPP) led by the third author, between a team of university-based researchers at a university in the US Midwest and a local school district.Over the course of four years, the RPP investigated how a linguistically expansive orientation (Prasad, 2021) to teaching and learning might support teachers and students to leverage the diverse multilingualisms of their school community as a resource for all learners.We use multilingualisms in the plural to highlight that the multilingual fabric of each of the classrooms involved in RPP was ever-evolving, dynamic, and complex.The RPP adopted a social design-based research methodology (Wang & Hannafin, 2005) to explore in practice how students' communicative repertoires could be mobilized and expanded through critical multilingual multiliteracies.Educators were involved throughout the RPP in collaboratively designing pedagogical units of study, reflecting on them through meetings, shared google docs, and focus groups.They ultimately determined how and when each step of the classroom-based research was carried out.Some educators from the broader RPP have also been involved in the dissemination of findings.
Research conducted by the RPP is situated at the intersection of multiliteracies pedagogy (New London Group, 1996), culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), and CMLA (García, 2017).The design of collaborative multilingual multiliteracies projects based on a CMLA approach draws on the original domains of Language Awareness (James & Garrett, 1992) and García's (2017) conceptualization of CMLA by placing power at the center of all discussions about languages, language users and language learner.Figure 1 offers a representation of Prasad's (2018;Prasad & Lory, 2020) original adaptation of James and Garrett's (1992) five domains of language awareness as a CMLA framework to guide curriculum development and practice.

Criticality, Creativity, and Collaboration
Three key aspects which guided the design of multilingual multiliteracies projects with an explicit focus on CMLA were: Criticality, Creativity, and Collaboration.Following critical scholar Freire (2018), we understand education can be a process through which the existing status quo is established or it can be "the practice of freedom" through which we learn to "deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of [our] world" (p.17).Critical multilingual multiliteracies projects seek to engage students as bi/multilingual actors who can collaboratively resist mononormativity through their creative, multilingual, and multimodal production.

Criticality
Multiliteracies projects foster an awareness of power relations among languages, language users, and in the context of language learning.Critical thinking is the ability to think for oneself, challenge perceived wisdom on cultural, political, and social phenomena, apply reasoning and logic to new or unfamiliar ideas and solve problems and attend to relations of power at work (e.g., Diaz-Rico & Weed, 2006;Wei, 2011).Culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) provide teachers with the skills to teach students how to become critical thinkers by integrating their cultural and linguistic experiences with challenging learning experiences involving higher-order thinking and critical inquiry.

Creativity
Critical multilingual multiliteracies projects allow all students to invest their expansive "identities of competence" in their work (Cook, 1995).When teachers engage students and their families in multilingual projects, they create a context for collective cultural and linguistic resources to be leveraged to accomplish collaborative academic work.Beghetto and Yoon (2021) highlight that "creative learning thrives in difference, not sameness, and thereby benefits from drawing on students' and teachers' diverse cultural, socio-historical and linguistic experience" (p.568).Based on her work engaging multilingual learners in producing creative multilingual texts, Choi (2015) argues that creative multilingual work offers multilingual learners 'invitations to criticality'.Our design of critical multilingual multiliteracies projects purposefully engaged children in creative expression through the arts as a way of tempering classroom conditions to support students not only in learning subject matter but also in learning about, from, and with their peers.The goal is not necessarily for all students to develop bi/multilingual proficiency per se, but rather to develop their capacity to understand and work with others from different social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

Collaboration
Collaboration was at the centre of our design of multilingual multiliteracies projects as spaces of reciprocal encounter.Students working collaboratively in their home and community languages to develop their writing skills is a powerful resource, not just for engagement, but also for learning and practicing the disciplinary discourses of literacy.In their work on the science of collaboration in schools, Fullan and Edwards (2022) underscore that [d]oing complex things together takes a lot of practice and persistence to develop the skills and understanding of how to make it work.Collaboration is organic and the life of it requires continued sustenance of deliberation, reflection and perseverance.Students want to do stuff that is relevant to them and learning together and figuring out stuff together bridges the view from the classroom to each student's future (p.31).
In the context of multilingual multiliteracies projects, students worked collaboratively to create their collaborative multilingual and multimodal class books.All students and families, teachers, and community members were positioned as vital members of their collaborative community of learners.All members (irrespective of their language backgrounds) engaged in creative multilingual and multimodal work as multilingual speakers and listeners who were able to expand their communicative repertoires through collaboration with others who shared their cultural and linguistic resources.

Settings and Participants
This article focuses on data collected at LNEB, as part of the larger RPP described above.LNEB is a Kindergarten to Grade 5 Spanish-English TWI school of approximately 300 students located in a city in the midwestern United States.At the time of the study, school district data reported that the majority of the students were Hispanic/Latino (60.8%), with other students identifying as White (29.4%), two or more races (5.2%), Black or African American (3.9%), and Asian (0.7%).43.8% of students were identified as English learners and 57.2% were identified as socio-economically disadvantaged.While language-specific data related to the English learner population is not officially reported at the district level, the languages other than English spoken by families at LNEB included: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish.
LNEB implemented the 90/10 model of language allocation, in which Kindergarten students received 90% of the instruction in the minoritized language (Spanish) and 10% of the instruction in the majority language (English), with each subsequent grade receiving an additional 10% of instructional time in the majority language until reaching a 50/50 split of instructional time in Grades 4 and 5.The school typically followed a strict policy of language separation, where bilingual homeroom teachers provided instruction to students in either Spanish or English, in various blocks throughout the day.
Seven teachers (three kindergarten teachers, one first-grade teacher, and three second-grade teachers) participated in the study.Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics of these teacher participants.The teacher participants covered a wide range of experience levels and varied in the time that they had been teaching at LNEB.

Research Design
Following a social design-based research (SDBR) methodology, we engaged in collaborative research with seven Kindergarten to Grade 2 classroom teachers and their students in the spring of 2019 and then again during the 2019-2020 school year before school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Wang and Hannfin (2005) describe SDBR as " a systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories" (p.6).We worked collaboratively with teachers to co-design and co-implement multilingual multiliteracies projects based on the mandated curriculum -Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).During the implementation of the projects, one or more members of the research team were at school three to five days each week as participant observers in classrooms and for weekly co-planning with teachers to navigate co-shifts together (Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020).Table 2 summarizes the various stages implemented in the project, including collaborative planning, implementation, observation, and reflection from the research team, teachers, and students.

Timeline Description of Project Stages
Week 0 -Preparation Formal and informal meetings were conducted with the teachers to provide an overview of the project, share educational needs, and develop timelines and resources.Individual and collective meetings were organized with the teachers to plan activities and share feedback.
Week 1-2 -Multilingual Activities Teachers and students shared thoughts about cultural and linguistic diversity and bi/multilingualism to create a more ecological linguistic landscape (Menken et al., 2018).Drawing on the language ecology of the school community (families, school staff, community members, etc.), as well as languages spoken by research team members, diverse languages were introduced into the classroom.
Each grade level engaged with multilingual translations of mentor texts (Kindergarten: Brown Bear, Brown Bear; Grade 1: Rosie's Walk; Grade 2: Little Red Riding Hood) in different languages.Students explored multilingual activities such as comparing book covers in different languages, learning thematic multilingual songs, listening to multilingual read-aloud in person via parents and community members, as well as through videos, and creating their own book covers in multiple languages (see Figure 2).
In each grade, students also engaged in a variety of multilingual writing activities.For example, in Kindergarten, students practiced matching and writing colour words, later used to describe their animals, in Spanish, English, and Chinese.The Grade 1 students worked in small groups to put together Korean sentences together using picture cards with matching labels.Students practiced writing the sentences in Korean before translating the sentences into English or Spanish, noting how word order changed in each language.
In Grade 2, after selecting key vocabulary words in Spanish and English from their mentor text, students practiced writing the words in French and Korean.
Week 3-4 -Collaborative Writing and Book Making Each class created, illustrated, and published multilingual books guided by their mentor text.In Kindergarten, students selected their favourite animal.Then, they were provided with sentence stems to write sentences about their animal and its habitat in English and Spanish.Research team members then translated the sentences into Korean and French.A parent speaker of Yucatec Maya also contributed animal names.
In Grade 1, students collaboratively wrote a story about farm animals in Spanish to practice their use of prepositions and prepositional phrases.In a whole group discussion, the students shared their ideas, and the teacher transcribed them.As a class, they discussed word choice and clarified meanings.Then, the teacher translated the story into English, and the research team members translated the story into Korean and French.To support a Hebrew heritage language learner, a Hebrew-speaking graduate student assisted with the Hebrew translation.
The Grade 2 students created modern versions of Little Red Riding Hood.The students first sketched out a storyline collaboratively with their teacher.Then, they broke the story into smaller sections and with partners, wrote one section of the story.Each partnership was given the freedom to write according to its own strengths.Some worked collaboratively, writing in Spanish first and then translating it into English or vice versa.In other cases, each student wrote in their stronger language, sharing their versions to discuss and modify accordingly.
After writing their bilingual sections, the partners shared their Spanish and English versions with the entire class for collaborative revisions.
In each grade, students also created illustrations to accompany their texts as an important aspect to support their creative expression and bookmaking.In Kindergarten, students collaborated with their Art teacher to create tissue paper portraits of their favourite animals.In Grades 1 and 2, students did pencil drawings of their designated page(s), then used watercolour markers to add colour and depth to their designs.Photos were taken of all illustrations and then scanned and added to the book manuscripts by the research team.
Week 5 -Recording After the manuscripts were complete, the text was read aloud by students in Spanish.Due to time constraints and language proficiency, research team members and community members did read-alouds in Spanish, English, Korean, Hebrew, and French.Read-alouds were audio recorded.QR codes were linked to recordings and then included in books so students could listen to and share the read-alouds with their families.

Sharing and Reflection
After the books were complete, they were printed and each student was given a copy of the book.Copies were also given to the teacher and school library to keep in their collections.Students shared their books with their families and neighbours.At the end of the project, students reflected on their experience through drawing and writing.

Figure 2 Examples of Multilingual Activities
We purposely sought parental engagement in the project by doing read-alouds in different languages.In one case, a parent who spoke Yucatec Mayan, an Indigenous language spoken in Mexico, volunteered to read a traditional folktale in Yucatec Mayan.This created an authentic opportunity to invite parents and community members into the classroom as language and literacy experts (Cummins, 2009;Prasad, 2017).Then, we supported teachers and students to create, illustrate, and publish collaborative multilingual and multimodal books.A collaborative multilingual multiliteracies approach aligns with the mandated curriculum standards (see Appendix A).The goal of bookmaking was to provide students with a platform to represent multiple languages spoken by themselves, families, and community members while meeting mandated standards and developing CMLA across the five domains.As Rymes et al. (2016) have pointed out: The CCSS afford and encourage a wide range of language exploration, with the potential to develop students' language awareness…The standards do not explicitly mention, at any point, how exactly teachers should connect the use of multiple languages (English, Spanish), dialects (varieties of English or varieties of Spanish), or types of digital tools (cell phones or laptops), and modalities (text, Instagram, Tweets) to classroom practices.In other words, the CCSS make general propositions about language, but do not in any way delimit the range of communicative resources that students could be using to 'make real life connections' or explore 'shades of meaning' in language.Indeed, the standards leave open the extent to which language awareness might be framed in critical terms.For example, they say little about whether and to what extent teachers might engage students in activities that encourage them to question how different communicative resources are understood and valued in particular contexts.Likewise, they are surprisingly quiet on where, when, and how bi/multilingualism might be encouraged.(p.e261-e262) Although teachers work within the policy constraints of the classroom, they can leverage openings in the curriculum as opportunities to include and expand students' multilingualisms and CMLA.
Research team members worked with each participating teacher to determine how they felt most comfortable facilitating the writing of their multilingual book with students (see Weeks 3-4 in Table 2).While all the Kindergarten teachers followed the same process, the Grade 1 and 2 teachers implemented different approaches to their multilingual writing to provide students with more autonomy in the writing process.Prior to this project, teachers had followed the district's strict language separation policy for English and Spanish literacy so it was important for teachers to have flexibility with implementing bi/multilingual writing in order for them to feel more comfortable softening boundaries between languages.Some teachers and students started brainstorming in Spanish first and then English and others allowed both languages throughout the process.Ultimately, the multilingual books were produced with each of the languages included in different fonts and colours to help students notice similarities and differences within and across languages.Examples of classroom books are shown in Figure 3 below and complete copies are accessible via the following sites: https://issuu.com/clmi/docs/rosa_gr_1,https://issuu.com/clmi/docs/k_habitat_maestra_laura

Data Collection and Analysis
We documented the process and outcomes of developing critical multilingual multiliteracies projects through a variety of data sources, including teacher interviews, classroom observation notes and recordings, and student-generated artifacts (i.e., work samples, published multilingual books).The classroom teachers were interviewed at the beginning and end of the project.During the project, most classes engaged for approximately 30 minutes each day with the various activities, led by the classroom teacher with support from the researchers when needed.Observation notes were taken during and directly after each observation.Some of the classroom observations were audio/video recorded with an iPod or iPhone but recordings often included interference from competing conversations and activities within the classroom which made it difficult to conduct conversation analysis.Then, various data sources (classroom observations, teacher interviews, audio/video recordings of classroom observations, and classroom artifacts) were analyzed to identify main themes and insights to understand dynamic and complex languaging practices that unfolded through the design and implementation of the multilingual multiliteracies projects.All collected forms of data were organized and categorized in NVivo for data analysis.The data were constantly compared (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) by continuously revisiting, reorganizing, reviewing, and analyzing as data sources were added to the study.Following Creswell and Poth (2018), Stake (2006), andYin (2003) approaches to thematic analysis, we examined multiple forms of data to develop a general representation of how teachers leveraged students' cultural and linguistic repertoires as resources for teaching and learning and how engaging in critical multilingual multiliteracies projects impacted students' languaging practices and identity negotiation.The data set provided insights into the teachers' perspectives and practices within the context of multilingual multiliteracies pedagogies.

Results and Discussion
Our research question sought to understand how engaging in critical multilingual multiliteracies projects impacts students' language practice and identity negotiation.Based on our analysis, we identified three key contributions of implementing critical multilingual multiliteracies projects within TWI classrooms: 1) fosters students' positive bi/multilingual identities; 2) supports linguistic risk-taking for teachers and students; 3) encourages students' CMLA.We further underscore the value of opening up TWI spaces to additional languages and cultures as a way of supporting all learners' awareness and appreciation of different forms of cultural and linguistic diversity and its value for both individuals and communities

Bi/multilingual Identity
Students demonstrated an eagerness to engage with multilingual activities, asking their Maestra if they could write in more than two languages or if they could try reading books in new languages.Tied to the affective and social domains of CMLA, students demonstrated excitement when they heard or saw languages that they could identify with.For example, Sophia, whose grandparents are Chinese, was excited to see multilingual activities in Chinese and conveyed satisfaction and pride in her multilingual skills through explicit comments such as "I love the word [language] that I speak", "They are all in Chinese, so I can do it."The multilingual activities created a space in which she felt confident in using her home language and offered Sophia an opportunity to show her Chinese identity which had previously been relatively hidden when only using the instructional languages of Spanish and English.Yet, Sophia did not limit herself to Chinese.Instead, as shown in Figure 4, when designing her multilingual book cover, Sophia chose to write the title in Arabic, Chinese and English.Sophia drew on all of her linguistic resources "to maximize understanding, self-expression, and achievement" (Lewis et al., 2012, p. 655).By engaging in multilingual activities that incorporated languages other than Spanish and English, students were able to go beyond the narrow frame of Spanish-English bilingualism.In TWI classrooms, students are rarely afforded more expansive linguistic positionalities as they are categorized as one kind of language learner by the program model (English Learner or Spanish Learner) (Chaparro, 2019;de Jong, 2016;Fitts, 2006;Palmer, 2019).By introducing other languages and recognizing the home languages of students, children were positioned as imaginative and expansive individuals, capable of learning multiple languages and using multiple languages to learn.

Figure 4 Sophia's Multilingual Book Cover
In another example, when Johnny's mother learned about the project, she walked into the classroom and asked one of the researchers if she could bring some Polish books to share with the whole class.She explained that Johnny was talking about the project at home and wanted to share his "mom's language" with the class.A research team member eagerly agreed and asked if she could come in and read the book in Polish.Johnny's mother came to the class and read 'The Snowy Day' in Polish.Even though the students did not know Polish, they were engaged throughout her reading.Students also asked Johnny's mother a variety of questions including, "What's your name in Polish?", and "How do you say 'hello' in Polish?"This experience mediated a classroom space where community members stepped in as experts to share their cultural and linguistic repertoires and helped students to claim their bilingual identities in ways that recognized and leveraged them.This positioning of multilingual parents as having language expertise allowed parents to feel welcome in the school.
Through engaging in this project and working through some initial discomfort with encountering unfamiliar languages and differences, teachers began to make space for identity negotiation and expression that went beyond the traditional Spanish-English focus, to expand the space to intersectional identities (Bettney, 2021;Block & Corona, 2016).For example, during one classroom activity, students created their own multilingual book covers based on a text they were exploring in different languages in class.As Hamman-Ortiz and Prasad (2022) highlight, one student, Lena, used the Hebrew title of the book in her creation of her book cover design.When responding to a writing prompt asking why she chose particular languages for her book cover, Lena responded "Es mi cultura", meaning, "It is my culture".

Figure 5 Lena's Multilingual Book Cover
In discussing this activity, Lena expressed to a research team member that she had not previously had the opportunity at school to use Hebrew, an important language for her family.Through this activity, Lena found space at school to make visible this aspect of her identity which had previously been invisible.Another student included Korean in their book cover drawing, noting they used Korean because they knew a bit of Korean through their exposure to the language in this project.Students began to see both their home languages but also new languages as part of their communicative repertoires and drew on them to communicate their understanding and meaning-making Through linguistically expansive activities that invited multilingual responses, students had the opportunity to select from among the varied linguistic resources that made up their communicative repertoires and make explicit their thinking about their choices (Hamman-Ortiz & Prasad, 2022;Prasad, 2021).This type of metacognitive reflection and expression supports students' multilingual language awareness (cognitive and performative domains), as well as their literacy engagement (Cummins, 2009).
Critical multilingual multiliteracies projects support intersectional identity negotiations and positively position multilingualism (Creese & Blackledge, 2010;García & Menken, 2015).According to García (2010), multilingual speakers can choose "who they want to be and choose their language repertoire accordingly" (p.524).They open "third spaces" (Gutiérrez, 2008) that bridge students' home language practices with academic language practices (García, 2009).By opening up pedagogical third spaces in which students can draw from multiple linguistic and cultural repertoires, the projects created a safe environment where students could perform their ways of being and engage in critical and creative learning processes in which their identities as bilingual learners were expanded and affirmed (affective and social domains) (de Jong, 2016; García & Leiva, 2014;Wei, 2011).

Linguistic Risks
Throughout the project, we observed students and teachers begin to take linguistic risks.Outside the confines of defined Spanish and English spaces, students and teachers were able to play with languages, without an expectation of a certain level of competence.For example, a teacher reflected in her final interview that a student picked up a book written in Vietnamese and attempted to read it to their classmates, applying their knowledge of decoding text written using the Roman alphabet with Spanish pronunciation.The student proceeded to read the book, while his classmates asked each other if he really spoke Vietnamese.In a context in which students are often concerned about making mistakes while learning Spanish and English, the introduction of new, unfamiliar languages provided teachers and students with opportunities to engage with language, without expectations of "full" competence.
In another example, one teacher shared in her post-project interview her experience being in class when Korean was introduced to the students and students began to laugh.She noticed that she felt surprised and a bit embarrassed that students in a bilingual school still felt uncomfortable around other languages than the languages of instruction.She felt their reaction pushed the school back toward an exclusionary monolingual stance and she felt this reflected poorly on the school.Still, she noticed that as students were exposed to other languages throughout the project, they became more comfortable with linguistic differences.In considering this teacher's reflection, it is important to note within this and many school spaces, laughing at or ridiculing different cultural groups, religious groups, or races would be considered unacceptable.Yet, when it came to language, particularly languages that were not used in classroom instruction, teachers and students at first did not know how to react.Their reaction with laughter points to the need, even within bilingual schools, to address issues related to linguistic diversity, identity, and raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015), particularly with languages and language users who may be marginalized or made less visible.While students' laughter was identified as a sign of discomfort, naming the reaction allowed the teacher to initiate a discussion about respecting other languages and their users, focusing on the power dimension of CMLA to draw students' awareness to their reaction to the unfamiliar.
Together, both teacher and students were able to move past their discomfort with being exposed to different languages to a place where they were more prepared to engage and become more competent in mediating linguistic differences.For example, during one multilingual activity, students created their own multilingual covers in the languages that they chose.One of the research team members was sitting next to Mary who was drawing the cover but was not writing anything.When she asked Mary why, Mary responded that she was unable to write in English.She told the student that she could write in any language and that all she had to do was try.The student wrote Rosie's Walk in Arabic (see Figure 6).When asked why she chose Arabic, Mary replied, "It's a new language."When responding to the writing prompt asking why she chose a particular language for the book cover, Mary tried to write in English what she had been explaining.The researcher assumed the Spanish dominant speaker tried to write, "Because I wanted to try a new writing."Even though the student expressed concern about her lack of proficiency in writing in English, she stepped out of her comfort zone and engaged in the multilingual activity to create the Arabic book cover and explained the justification for her choice in English.Through engaging in multilingual activities, all students were supported in taking linguistic risks as the activities provided an initial step into building awareness of the conventions of print and writing in different languages and all students were invited to try out writing in new languages.

Figure 6
Mary's Multilingual Book Cover TWI provides a unique opportunity to develop students' comfort not only as multilingual speakers but also as multilingual listeners (Prasad, 2022) because all students are learning in two languages and may be exposed to even more through their classmates and in their communities.

Expanding CMLA
Engaging in multilingual multiliteracies activities and projects provided students with opportunities to register what the languages sounded like, how the words were written, and other aspects of languages that students found interesting and unique.These spontaneous and planned moments of language awareness led students to compare and contrast features of different languages and language use.The excerpt below is from a recording of verbal interactions between students and teachers during a read-aloud of Rosie's Walk.The teacher read the Spanish and English versions of Rosie's Walk and introduced other multilingual versions of the book to the students.The children used different strategies to differentiate the various languages, including considering print directionality and illustrations: Johnny: Apenas si se abren al revés que el español.[They open the other way around than the Spanish.]Teacher: Sí, sí. [Yes, yes.]As the teacher continued prompting her students, the conversation turned to an analysis of the picture on the cover of the book.The students were not only concentrating on the print directionality but also on the illustration of the book cover: Johnny: El zorro está al otro lado.Y en español está aquí.Y en inglés también está aquí, pero en árabe está aquí.[The fox is on the other side.And in Spanish it is here.And in English it is also here, but in Arabic it is here.]Teacher: ¿Y qué? [So?] Johnny: El idioma se lee a la otra dirección y… [The language is read in the other direction and…] In this excerpt, we see the students used two strategies to differentiate between the languages.The directionality of print played an important role in differentiating the languages.Students familiar with Spanish and English knew that they opened the front book cover and read the text from left to right, yet when they opened a Hebrew book, it was from what they considered the back cover and read text from right to left.The second strategy the students used was based on the illustration of the cover.Aligned with the print directionality, the fox was positioned differently among languages.Students were able to identify differences and this conversation brought to the surface aspects of the student's metalinguistic awareness.They were able to discuss the differences they noticed in terms of how to identify Spanish, English, and Hebrew.
In another example, as part of a science unit on habitats, Kindergarten teachers and their students used the book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, as a mentor text to create a collaborative multilingual book.Students created illustrations using paper collages and wrote their own sentences: "Animal, animal, ¿dónde vives?Yo vivo en el ___.Yo como ___." [Animal, Animal, where do you live?I live in the _____.I eat ____].By writing their contributions in Spanish and English for their multilingual book, all students were able to use their linguistic expertise in one language to support their writing in the other.Furthermore, from a comparative perspective, seeing their sentences in multiple languages made visible to students that languages have different conventions of print and punctuation patterns.Students were able to make sense of such rules in context when the languages were lined up side-by-side.A comparative chart, shown in Figure 7, was also created using animal words in diverse languages spoken by families and researchers.

Figure 7 Comparative Chart of Animal Names in Different Languages
Creating a comparative chart supported students' multilingual language awareness by highlighting the relationship between their languages (Auger, 2008;Cenoz & Gorter, 2011;Jiménez et al., 2015).Students creatively and strategically accessed their linguistic repertoires to make sense of their multilingual chart, noticing similarities and differences and direct borrowings.Multilingual activities such as this one leveraged the crosslinguistic connections that learners naturally establish when learning languages (Cummins, 2007), and achieved a more cognitively-engaged learning process.Cummins (2012) underscores that building students' multilingual language awareness "represents a powerful instructional strategy for all students [,] but for immigrant and marginalized group students it can mean the difference between academic success and failure" (p.41).By enabling students to use their full communicative repertoire, critical multilingual multiliteracies leveraged and expanded students' CMLA.Related to the power domain, in particular, the creation of the animal chart extended a discussion about why there are no names for certain animals in Yucatec Maya.For example, while bird was translated to ch'íilic'in Yucatec Maya, the Spanish word mapache was used for raccoon.The parent speaker of Yucatec Maya explained to students that Yucatec Maya speakers do not have names of some animals or things that might not be found in local contexts where Yucatec Maya has been spoken historically.They might use the Spanish word instead.This insight helps build students' awareness that languages and their users have particular histories and contexts that give them meaning.In sum, implementing critical multilingual multiliteracies projects provided significant opportunities for students to develop their biliteracy in Spanish and English while also making visible languages other than English and Spanish.The project supported students and teachers in their development of positive bi/multilingual identities, in taking linguistic risks, and in strengthening their critical multilingual language awareness.
Our findings align with de Pietro's (2003) notion of the efficacy of plurilingual "detours" such that including languages beyond Spanish and English in TWI can foster students' curiosity about language(s) that in turn can open up conversations about how language(s) work, as well as language learning and about diverse language users themselves.In the end, such detours may in fact be central to the emancipatory project of TWI as Garcia ( 2009) notes that "to recognize the multiple language practices that heterogeneous populations increasingly [into] schooling, more than any other context, has the potential to liberate" (p.157).Indeed, multilingual multiliteracies projects allowed us to explore in collaborative practice how teachers in TWI can shift towards a linguistically expansive orientation to teaching and learning that both supports the development of Spanish and English proficiency while understanding and fostering students' development as dynamic and evolving multilingual actors.At the conclusion of the project, teachers reflected that our partnership was essential in making co-designing and co-shifting practice --not because they had not wanted to affirm students' identities previously but rather because they needed guidance and support to identify multilingual materials and to design multilingual multiliteracies projects in the classroom.As a research team, we were mindful that teachers work within constrained spaces --constrained by policies at various levels, resources, time, etc.Our RPP has underscored the role educational researchers can play in multilingual teacher education and our critical responsibility to leverage our resources to support the translation of theory into practice in sustainable ways.
Opening up space for other languages within the context of TWI does not have to result in giving up targeted or protected language instruction in Spanish and English.Rather, we found by adopting a linguistically expansive approach, teachers supported all learners in developing competence as multilingual speakers and multilingual listeners.This capacity to mediate across one's communicative repertoire in a variety of contexts and for different purposes is at the heart of TWI.Bilingual education programs were developed in the US as a right for language-minoritized children and youth to equitable educational outcomes via bilingual instruction.TWI programs also offer English dominant speakers the opportunity to develop bilingualism and biliteracy in English and Spanish.Critical scholars have cautioned, however, that TWI can differentially benefit English dominant speakers rather than the language minoritized speakers for whom they were initially designated (Valdés, 1997).This collaborative research provides an empirical account for understanding linguistic diversity not as a threat to bilingual development but rather as a lever to support the objectives of TWI both academically and socially.While it can appear to be counter-intuitive to introduce other languages into instruction when biliteracy in Spanish and English is the academic target, engaging students in collaborative, creative, and critical multilingual multiliteracies can consolidate students' understanding of the languages of instruction, while also provoking curiosity about other languages and their users.As students demonstrate greater curiosity about other languages and their users, they become more invested not only in their own linguistic development but also can become more explicitly aware of power relations related to languages and among language users.This initial empirical work provides a starting place for research in theory and practice for linguistically expansive orientations in bilingual education.Critical multilingual multiliteracies are particularly relevant to TWI because it is a ripe environment to work with culturally and linguistically diverse populations who bring a range of communicative practices to their learning.Within the context of TWI classrooms, which are at times exclusively focused on one single language of instruction at a time, this project repositioned all students and teachers as dynamic language users, as both experts and learners who continually draw on the full expanse of their communicative repertoires.This project provides an example of shifting of power relations, as all students were encouraged to draw on all of their linguistic repertoires, while also being introduced to languages that were completely new to them.

Conclusion
While our findings align with other empirical accounts of classroom-based identity text work in multilingual classrooms in terms of identity investment and literacy engagement (Cummins et al., 2005;Cummins et al, 2015;Kapoyannis, 2019;Pennington, 2011), this study further contributes to understanding how designing multilingual multiliteracies projects in TWI immersion settings creates a context of expanding students identity options while expanding their CMLA and that opening up space for students' multilingualisms can further make explicit for all students how language(s) and dynamic languaging across languages works.Such explicit bridging has been advocated for between Spanish and English in TWI, but to our knowledge, this study offers the first empirical account of expanding beyond the frame of Spanish-English bilinguals to prepare students for the multilingual realities of society today.Through our empirical account, we seek to inspire further classroom-based research to inform the knowledge base related to designing linguistically expansive learning in TWI.
As a response to the increasing diversity in classrooms, this study provides an important perspective on the process and outcomes of creating critical multilingual multiliteracies projects within a US two-way bilingual education context.As García and Kleifgen (2018) point out, "minoritized languages need to be protected, but they cannot be isolated" (p.76).Though it is important to maintain separate spaces to protect minoritized language development, it is also crucial to strategically develop spaces to soften the linguistic boundaries (García & Lin, 2017) to center how students do and practice bilingualism so that they can bring their full linguistic and cultural repertoires to their learning.Multiliteracies pedagogies offer flexibility for instruction and "makes possible a more equitable and dynamic vision for educating bilingual students" (Seltzer & García, 2020, p. 10).
As we have learned through this empirical study with classroom teachers, students, and families, doing critical multilingual multiliteracies projects in the context of TWI is possible --even if the process and progress are non-linear and messy at times.As Phipps (2019) exhorts, detours should not prevent us, however, from engaging in this work.Creative multilingual multiliteracies production is critical as it centres the experiences and expertise of culturally and linguistically minoritized learners by inviting dominant and minoritized learners to collaborate on a shared task that could not be accomplished without all members.Through projects, all learners are invited to leverage their expertise across languages and modes to produce texts that reflect students not simply as they are but rather as who they, as a community, can become --a community of creative, capable, multilingual actors.

Figure 3
Figure 3 Examples of Pages from Student-Created Multilingual Books