Language has long served as an ambivalent proxy for national identity in the United States, a land of bountiful multilingual diversity also known unceremoniously as the “graveyard of languages.” As such, moments of linguistic flourishing in our public schools have alternated over time with those of English-Only suppression. California is currently awakening from its most recent English-only era with the State’s schools re-opening their doors to multilingual education with the passing of Proposition 58 in 2016 unleashing a “Bilingual Renaissance.”

Drawing from my nearly three decades of work as a multilingual educator, my own bilingual journey, and that as a parent of an emerging bilingual daughter, I will discuss the historical and political contours of this “Bilingual Renaissance” and its linkages to our Unitarian Universalist values of personal transformation and social justice advocacy.

Adam Sawyer is Associate Professor of Teacher Education at CSU Bakersfield where he leads the University’s Bilingual Authorization Program. Prior to his work in higher education, Adam served as a Spanish Bilingual elementary school teacher in East Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, CA. Husband to Mirna, father to Hector (age 19) and Marambinah (Binah) Asunción (age 8), Adam is a second generation Unitarian-Universalist who grew up in the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists and participated as a camper and counselor at Rowe Junior High Camp (MA) as a youth.

He has been a member, quite proudly, of both the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Kern County and the Unitarian Universalists of Santa Clarita Valley.