Congratulations to CAL President Joel Gómez on receiving the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) 2018 Ramón Santiago Award, presented at this month’s NABE Conference. The award is named for the founder of NABE and represents career-long contributions to bilingual education, mother tongue education and social justice.

In accepting the award, Gómez briefly touched on themes that he shares with Ramón Santiago – using a student’s command of community discourse functions as the foundation for developing academic content discourse abilities; using a bilingual rather than a monoglot’s lens to assess the dual language ability of students; and emphasizing the importance of identity creation and how it impacts students who are learning English as a new language.

The NABE conference was held in Albuquerque, NM and attracted about 3,000 participants.