We leave readers with a brief, yet we believe profound provocation to ponder on, which has (and will continue to) radiate in our own hearts and spirits. It's evident from our pláticas, that in our past work, we've felt a sense of urgency to change early childhood and bilingual education – but in this moment, we feel like there is an opening that didn't exist before. So we ponder, and invite all to reflect upon our roles in moving forward. With a building urgency for change, and the momentum and transformative possibilities this offers, weeks, months, and years from now, what will the collective ‘we’ choose to remember?

We know not all white bilingual people have had the privilege of traveling abroad and learning a second language as an adult. Some grew up in neighborhoods of color or attended predominantly Latinx schools.

The profound injustice of slavery has been erased in our educational system in the US (Leonardo, 2013). The lynching of Black and Mexican peoples has been erased. Not enough people talk about it – especially with young children. They are very capable of having conversations about racialized violence, injustice, and inequities (Boutte, 2008; Doucet & Adair, 2013). What will education that centers these struggles and empowerment of BIPOC communities do to engage children in a way that compassion then exists for the Other, and just as importantly, a strong and actionable desire to not repeat history?I view this moment as a sort of metaphorical fork in the road. If we decide to go in a direction that we've always gone, where we completely erase and ignore violence against Black and Indigenous people, for instance, in our world and in our country – if we decide to go this route of erasure, we are merely repeating the past. In erasing or ‘forgetting,’ we are making a conscious decision in education to perpetuate structural racism, everyday racism, and anti-Blackness. We have a choice. If we choose to continue to engage in historical amnesia (Cordis, 2019), I won't be surprised if we wake up 20 years from now, or even sooner, and we have another Trump in power, because when you erase the lived realities of the oppressed, these are the consequences. The 74 million who voted for Trump are the consequences of our long standing white supremacist educational system. I view our job right now as continuing in the struggle, which we have always engaged in, but that we must continue to persist in.

: I agree, and I think, as well, that we're in a moment where there seems to be a heightened understanding about injustice. Some who haven't had this understanding or lived experience prior to Covid-19, are able to finally see the inequities that have surfaced to become more visible in the world (even though they've been there all along). So this could be a moment to hone, to say we're in this together. And knowing this, how do we, as you've talked about Paty, acknowledge and transform the colonial and racist ways that we have created and have lived in the world, including what we've done to our planet. So, in some ways, there are gifts in this moment, to be able to reconnect with each other, to have new ways of understanding that those with privilege might not have acknowledged before. This should inform how we move forward.

In this final plática, we offer insights into possibilities for what the future might hold based on the foundations of early childhood and bilingual education, and what has transpired in the US and across the globe due to Covid-19 and a reckoning with anti-Blackness and racialized oppression.

It sounds like both bilingual education and early childhood education have applied theories (and created forms of measurement based on these theories) that have positioned children of color as deficit. This is what's so disheartening. From pre-birth and into the early years, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are talked about as being ‘at-risk’ because our/their ways of knowing and being differ from the universalized whitewashed standard that's been created (Brown, 2016)

In bilingual education, we have a similar historical grounding as ECE, especially since much of the research has been conducted in the earlier years of life. Importantly, there is a difference in the research on bilingual education in the United States versus other countries because of distinct socio-political contexts (Bialystock, 2018). Also, many decisions made in bilingual education, dual language, and second language acquisition are based on constructs developed with sequential bilinguals – those learning a second language after six years of age (Escamilla & Hopewell, 2010; Baker, 2011). Only recently has there been a shift in paradigms with research done with simultaneous bilinguals – children learning or exposed to two or more languages from birth until they enter K-12 schooling (Escamilla & Hopewell, 2010).

Some provocations that guided us in these initial pláticas were unpacking the whitewashing of these fields and deficit constructions of minoritized young children, especially those who identify as BIPOC

Our pláticas on early childhood and bilingual education came about from weekly gatherings over the course of three months, in which we learned more about each other and built trust and rapport. As the pandemic of 2020 progressed and physical distancing became more important, we utilized Zoom to record and transcribe our on-going virtual pláticas. Using women of color feminisms to guide us and find points of connection, we discussed and reworked the transcribed text in order to share our pláticas with you – the reader – on past, current, and future visions of early childhood and bilingual education. In the forthcoming, we present these wonderings and provocations.

pláticas can result in a spectrum of sentiments, from the disheartening to the over joyous, through which learning and consejos happen. As such, through pláticas, Chicana/Latina scholars reclaim and legitimize not only knowledges from our communities, but also methods and approaches to educational studies

Turtle Island continues to permeate the legacies of colonialism, denying First Nations’ rights and invisibilizing the strength, fortitude, and empowerment of Indigenous Peoples

language alternation is now increasingly seen as unproblematic—an additional communicative resource for people who command several languages.

The deficit view of bilingual talk, which includes code-switching and other forms of language alternation, became increasingly challenged with the rise of discourse-oriented approaches to bilingualism, most notably interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis. Rejecting the reductionist conceptualisation of bilingualism as, above all, a mental faculty, scholars began to record and analyse actual, naturally occurring samples of talk where more than one language were being used

bilingual conversations were minutely ordered and instances of code-switching often proved highly functional for the participants.

Before research on code-switching took shape around the late 1970s, such ‘mixed’ forms of language use were generally treated with much scepticism, chiefly because they were at odds with the normative, monolingually infused conception of the ideal bilingual person. In the case of bilingual children, code-switching was even seen as evidence of insufficient bilingual competence

Thus, the idea that premature bilingual development may lead to semilingualism (a state of not reaching sufficient proficiency in either language) does not hold up in current research.

research on bilingualism has been persistently informed by a monolingual perspective, where theoretical conceptualisations and analytical interpretations begin with the idea that humans are born with a hard-wired mental device for acquiring a first language.