Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D.

teacher, researcher, life-long learner

The Other

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picture of lisa dorner with statement "I'm honored to be here" and a sticker "choose happy"

I’ve wanted to write this post for awhile, something about integration, crossing cultures, understanding others, having difficult conversations, standing up for what is right, trying to figure out what is right — but the world has been heavy, the challenges have been many, work and family have been busy, and I have been stuck.

But now, it’s time. It’s been over two years since I promised myself that I’d try to write an essay each month, and over one year since I posted anything at all. Writing is one way to preserve history, understand what is happening, find commonality, and respond. And what a better time to do this kind of work than on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2026? So, let’s begin.

About one week ago, I was at a storytelling workshop focused on the Asian American experience in St. Louis, supported in part by the organization where I work (more on that later). During our initial activity, we were we instructed to present a “gift” related to our story, and one of the participants handed me a figurine of a goddess from her home culture, and said,

‘This is for the Other in a Room Full of Others.’

I was so struck by this statement that I asked her to repeat it, and then I repeated it myself. This statement stayed with me. In the words of another friend, this gift “said the quiet part out loud.” In just a few short words, she highlighted that I was different. Indeed, I was the only white person in the room, the only person without a mother or father or grandparent from an Asian country, and certainly, I hadn’t been the only one who had noticed that.

But this gift also invited us to remember and reflect that everyone else in the room was also an “other,” or had been othered, at some point in their lives — in fact, quite likely to a much greater extent than myself in our predominantly white region. Nonetheless, for this brief moment, even though each of our experiences and backgrounds and lives had been really different, we were brought to recognize with this short statement that, fundamentally, we all shared that otherness, or being an-other person.

Brilliant!

I carry this with me in my work, in my life. I am currently the director of a research and outreach center founded in the early 2000s by professors and community members who saw a need to understand demographic change in the Midwestern United States. They were particularly curious about the “new Latin American diaspora” settling across the Midwest and Southwest, changing predominantly mono-cultural small towns and suburbs into much more diverse places. And, now I realize, one of the most important things they did in their research and outreach over the years was to consider everyone an “other.” Their research was not only about how immigrants from Mexico or migrant farm workers from Central America were learning English, or finding homes, improving their economic circumstances, or getting to know (or not) the others in their new town. It was also about how long-term (mostly white) residents were experiencing the demographic change and getting to know (or not) their new neighbors. Ultimately, it would take the whole community together to ensure integration and well-being for all, breaking down misconceptions of the “other” from all angles being a key part of this work. That is one reason that our center is currently hosting storytelling workshops as part of a year-long festival to honor how ‘Migration Made Missouri.” We need to share our stories, to understand our pasts, to work together.

More of this work to connect and sow seeds of connection is essential at this very moment. Right now, our U.S. federal government is not in the business of promoting understanding or sharing stories; instead, they are using fear of change and immigration as their single story to drive division and sow chaos, targeting Los Angeles, Chicago, DC, Charlotte, and now, Minneapolis. We cannot let their single story define our country, and each of us must not be defined by a single story (thank you for my still-ever favorite TED talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie).

I have so much admiration for all those this past year, who stood up for what was right, who told their stories, who loved their neighbors, and who protested what was wrong in the cold and in the rain. We must keep it up. Indeed, we are all others in a world full of others, and we must continue to show up for one an-other.

Blurring Boundaries – Take II

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On October 19, 2014, I posted an extended blog piece drawing from research I had recently done in my communities across the St. Louis region (urban, rural, suburban). At the time, based upon a research study about people’s perceptions of immigrants and knowledge of immigration policies, I was struck by how people make judgements about nebulous groups of “others,” even while they have good friends, who they respect and admire, who are part of those same groups. In short, we humans so easily create boundaries between “us” and “them,” even as we love and support the folks we may other at times.

Now, today, November 6, 2024, I am struck by how boundaries seemed to have been cemented, rather than blurred, over the past 10 years. I am struck — we still need inspiration and hope and a lot of work to blur the boundaries that divide us/them, and to try to figure out how to work together to build a better future.

I ask you to read through this old blog, to see what may resonate with you, to brainstorm how we each can individually reach out and work toward good, common ground with others: https://www.lisamdorner.com/blurring-boundaries/ … let me know what you think: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-m-dorner-3b71159/

New Conference on Bilingual Education in the Midwest

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Do you work in a dual language program that serves bilingual and bicultural students? Are you interested in developing more equitable programs and enhancing educational opportunities at your school?

Building Raciolinguistic Justice in Midwestern Dual Language Programs through Research-Practice Partnerships is a year-long project supported by the Spencer Foundation; coordinated by me, Trish Morita-Mullaney, Deborah Palmer, and Amy Young; and implemented in partnership with many other bilingual educators and scholars. The project is designed to enhance and develop critical consciousness in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) in the US Midwest.

What is DLBE and why is critical consciousness important for it? Dual language bilingual education is a unique educational approach where teachers provide content instruction in English and another language, aiming to develop bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism for a diverse student body. Yet despite the fact most programs integrate and serve students from various backgrounds, DLBE continues to face persistent challenges with equity, especially for students of color and youth who speak languages other than English (see here). This is true in all program models regardless of the label (one-way, two-way, 90/10, 50/50, etc.). In turn, we must build critical consciousness, that is, processes to study such inequities and take action to disrupt them.

The project has three main goals:

  1. Document and more deeply understand how Midwestern DLBE programs serve diverse students, especially children of color from bilingual and bicultural homes.
  2. Develop research-practice partnerships and new research agendas for understanding and addressing equity challenges through critical consciousness.
  3. Foster a community of practice and network of researchers and practitioners to build antiracist, equitable DLBE programs across the region.

We invite DLBE educators to join our webinar series this June! Partnering with the Cambio Center and CARLA, these four webinars will develop an understanding of DLBE challenges and opportunities across Midwestern DLBE programs. The webinars are organized around four actions that enhance critical consciousness:

  • Historicizing Dual Language Communities and Ourselves—Tuesday, June 14
    Learn about deconstructing mainstream explanations of the past and foregrounding individuals’ and communities’ local histories.
  • Critical Listening in Dual Language Education—Thursday, June 16
    Explore ways of engaging students, educators, and families with others for meaningful and transformative connection through developing curiosity and attention, sharing, caring, reciprocity, and responsivity.
  • Embracing Discomfort in Dual Language Spaces—Tuesday, June 21
    Experience and learn from the inevitable unsettled feelings one might have in recognizing, reflecting on, and acting against the ways in which our own privilege, sense of entitlement, or silence reify and reproduce social injustice.
  • Interrogating Power to Develop Equity in Dual Language Programs—Thursday, June 23
    Examine ways of calling out oppression, and working to push those in power to take note of injustice and to transform systems.

All webinars will take place on Zoom from 4–5:30 p.m. (Central Time).

For More Information

A Culture of Inclusion – or Not?

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This image is a hand drawing of a photograph from a school district website ~2015. On their homepage, this district had a rotating, colorful set of pictures, with children working together, learning, and studying. At a glance, we might feel pride if this was our district, agreeing with the words written next to the images: “innovation, vision, leaders, inclusion, rising to the challenge.”

But we must take a closer look: Who are the children in the images? Who is centered? Who actually feels included in the district, and who is considered a challenge?

In a recent publication, “School District Responses to Cultural and Linguistic Change: Competing Discourses of Equity, Competition, and Community,” Dr. Sujin Kim and I explore these questions through a study of website design and district visions and missions (as of July 1, 2020, the full text is available at this link). We found that some district websites used a promotional genre “to sell” their quality to viewers (presumably families who either live or might be moving to the area). One website was quite jarring, putting words like “innovation” and “vision” next to white children, while placing the phrase “rising to the challenge” nearby the only Black student pictured. Meanwhile, Asian children, who made up a sizable number of students at this district at the time, were only ever featured with their faces blurred out or backs to the camera, as in the picture above, which suggests the very opposite of “inclusion.” Only one district in our study employed a narrative genre, using their website to tell the story of their development as a community that welcomed immigrants and refugees, with accompanying photos of smiling children with different skin tones and clothes, such as hijabs.

In our current times, it is (again) all too apparent that our country needs to learn that #BlackLivesMatter, that people of color, including immigrant families and multilingual indigenous peoples, have not been included, have been disenfranchised, have even in some cases been eliminated. I hope that by raising an awareness of the discourses around us, we can begin to break these cycles of exclusion and removal. This includes carefully attending to the ways that pictures and words come together in our lives, which are increasingly displayed and lived online: What subtle (or not so subtle) messages are they sending? How can we change harmful discourses by re-working images and words that we use and that we choose to share?

Tweet your ideas to #ChangeTheDiscourse @lisamdorner

Multilingual Family Engagement

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Migration. Whether searching for greater opportunities or enriching experiences, or escaping poverty or war, people are on the move. Worldwide, the United Nations reports that more than 250 million people do not live in the country where they were born, an increase of 49% since 2000. In the United States, the percentage of children who have at least one immigrant parent or caregiver grew from 18% to 27% between 1997 and 2017. More than 20% of households speak a language other than English. Some schools that have never served students who speak other languages now have to design English language development or bilingual education programs. (Dorner, Song, Kim, & Trigos-Carrillo, 2019)

In this recent article published in Literacy Today, colleagues and I reflected on how schools manage this kind of change, especially: How do they integrate, support, and reach out to immigrant, multilingual families? Research has long suggested that traditional family engagement in schools fails to incorporate diverse communities in meaningful and empowering ways. This contributes to ongoing marginalization based on race, ethnicity, class, language, and immigrant status. In our work with various school districts, we encourage educators to shift their thinking from what families might need to how they, themselves, can lead. In the article, we provide examples of how to host literacy days in families’ languages, what we learned, and how to work with parents as partners in developing school-wide events.

We conclude: Too often, schools view home languages and cultures as deficits, with families merely receiving information and services.  If families and classroom teachers are at the center of family engagement, they will be leaders and agents, and together we can transform our English-only and monolingual spaces to multilingual, culturally sustaining ones.

 This article originally appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of Literacy Today, the member magazine of the International Literacy Association.