In Praise of Charlas: Cecilia Perez Brings Bilingual Workshops to the Los Angeles Public Library

Dr. Cecilia Perez (PhD, CCC-SLP), Assistant Professor in USC’s Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology Program, had her own upbringing in mind as she helped to develop a series of multilingual workshops with the Los Angeles Public Library, or workshops aimed at folks who speak two or more languages. Perez was raised in a Spanish-speaking home in Santa Ana, and, like many children of immigrants, learned English in school. She was frequently told, however, that her English wasn’t good enough or that Spanish wouldn’t help her get ahead in life. When she enrolled at California State University, Long Beach as an undergraduate, she didn’t initially know that she wanted to become a multilingual speech therapist; in fact, she thought she wanted to become a health teacher and hoped to specifically focus on sex ed, as this was a resource she knew was sorely missing from her community.

While in college, though, Perez worked as a special education aide for the linguistically-diverse Garden Grove Unified School District, where she met occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other service providers. She noticed that within special education, many thought it was best to avoid teaching children the language they spoke at home and to instead focus on teaching them English, believing that multilingual learning would prove distracting. Yet this often meant children in special education were cut off from a variety of rich language-based cultural, historical, and familial connections because of the presence of a disability. As a result of this important experience with the Garden Grove Unified School District, Perez became interested in studying speech-language pathology, realizing that it could bring together her love of language and her passion for community health and education, particularly in relation to speech.

Perez pursued her Master of Science degree in Communication Disorders at the University of Redlands, focusing on language development in a multilingual context and issues at the intersection of multilingualism and disability. She received her PhD from the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, and it was there, while she was looking to collect data as part of her doctoral research–in association with the Human Abilities in Bilingual Language Acquisition (HABLA) Lab at UC Irvine–that Perez would come to connect with the library system. Because Perez received the necessary IRB approval for her data collection right around the time that students got out of school for summer break, she wondered if running multilingual workshops at the public library could offer an alternative way to acquire data during the summer months. Though the workshops didn’t ultimately end up functioning as a source for data collection, Perez and her collaborators decided to move forward with them anyway, recognizing they filled a need in the community for bilingual programming.

Perez is now an Assistant Professor in the MS in Speech-Language Pathology Program at USC, where she teaches several clinical practicum courses as well as a course on the assessment of communication disorders. She has continued to develop multilingual workshops with the library system in collaboration with the HABLA Lab at UC Irvine, which was started by Dr. Elizabeth D. Peña (PhD) and Dr. Lisa Bedore (PhD). The HABLA Lab’s research focuses on understanding how bilingual individuals organize and access the different languages that they speak (usually English and the language that they speak at home with their families). The HABLA Lab’s goal is to better understand the issues faced by multilingual individuals with developmental language disorders (i.e. difficulty understanding and/or using words and sentences) with the goal of improving support systems for those students.

When Perez started her library workshops, she decided to call them “Charlas,” a Spanish word that translates to a “talk” or “chat” in English. In consulting with a number of branch librarians, Perez realized that there was also a need in the community for discussions addressing issues that may emerge when a multilingual student also has a disability. As Perez was conceiving of these workshops, she wanted to make sure they felt comfortable and accessible for participants, so she thought of holding the conversations over coffee and conchas (traditional Mexican sweet bread rolls) to create a more inviting atmosphere. After having heard so many stories throughout her life that only talked about the issues that multilingual children faced, Perez wanted to reinforce the fact that the community has many strengths as well.

Perez began with four sessions of bilingual Spanish-English workshops at the Benjamin Franklin Branch Library in Boyle Heights, the success of which led to a series of bilingual Chinese-English workshops at the Chinatown Branch Library and, most recently, a series of multilingual Spanish-Tagalog-English workshops at the Echo Park Branch Library. Perez and her collaborators wanted to ensure that these workshops were driven by the needs of each community, so they consulted with branch librarians throughout the process. Furthermore, for the workshops that were centered on Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tagalog, Perez brought in lab mates and students fluent in these languages to create programming that was authentic and relevant to each community.

In the first version of the workshops, parents and family members were presented with different hypothetical case scenarios to work through. For example, one scenario involved parents of a child recently diagnosed with autism who felt conflicted by instructions from the child’s school not to speak their native language at home in order to avoid confusing their child – instructions they did not feel comfortable following.  As Perez and her collaborators refined the workshops, they shifted their focus to establishing an overall topic of interest to participants for each session, such as bilingualism and child development or multilingualism and disability. Perez and her collaborators would begin by asking workshop participants what they already knew about the topic as a way of helping them realize they already had a lot of knowledge from their own experiences and lives. The workshop would then dig into specific questions the participants had about the subject at hand and at the end of the session, everyone would share what they had learned. This restructuring of the workshops helped to reinforce an environment where everyone could learn from each other versus the workshop leader being the only expert.

Looking forward, in addition to teaching courses at USC, Perez wants to continue to explore Latinx adolescent language practices. As a speech-language pathologist, she has seen a lot of brilliant Latinx adolescents inappropriately put into special education classes because of negative misperceptions about the community. She hopes that her work can center the brilliance of these adolescents as she continues to foster relationships with this community, one that has a vast store of knowledge that could be immensely helpful to educators and health practitioners.