Building Classrooms That Welcome Every Student: Professor María Luisa Parra on Inclusive Education

A child who speaks an Indigenous language, a student who grew up between Mexico and the United States, a young person who arrives at a new school after moving with their family. Their experiences are different, but they may all face the same question when they enter the classroom: Is there space here for who I am and what I know? 

This question is at the center of Enseñar y aprender en la interculturalidad: Orientaciones pedagógicas para construir aulas inclusivas, equitativas y justas, a new book published by El Colegio de México and coauthored by Professor María Luisa Parra Velasco, senior preceptor in Romance languages and literatures (Spanish) at Harvard University, together with Juan Sánchez García, Norma del Río Lugo, and Ana Lucía Zamudio González. 

The book was presented recently at El Colegio de México during the 10th anniversary of the Seminario de Lingüística y Educación (SEMLE). But the story behind this publication began several years earlier, with a shared concern about the changes that migration and linguistic diversity are bringing to schools. 

The project emerged through conversations among researchers and educators working in different national and educational contexts who were beginning to recognize similar challenges. 

“The collaboration emerged from the discovery that, despite working in different national contexts, we shared the same educational concern,” Professor Parra said, “Migration had connected our classrooms before we connected our projects.” 

Their backgrounds were different. Professor Parra has focused much of her academic work on the relationship between language, identity, and education, especially in bilingual and multicultural settings in the United States. Sánchez García has studied migration and the educational experiences of students on the move. They were joined by Norma del Río Lugo, who has experience in developmental psychology and children's rights, and Ana Lucía Zamudio González, a public school teacher in Indigenous education and the book's illustrator. 

Together, they began asking an important question: How can schools better respond to students whose languages, histories, and experiences do not always fit within traditional educational models? 

Their collaboration connects academic research with the everyday realities of classrooms in Mexico and other parts of Latin America and the United States, where internal and international migration are changing student populations and bringing new forms of linguistic and cultural diversity into schools. 

Schools often follow certain ideas about how students should learn, speak, and participate. But classrooms are much more complex. In Mexico, for example, many children and young people experience migration, speak Indigenous languages, or use different linguistic resources that, too often, are seen as problems that students must overcome in order to adapt to mainstream education. 

For Professor Parra, however, these experiences should not be understood as something schools need to compensate for or simply accommodate. 

“One of the convictions that became stronger during these years of work is that students’ linguistic, cultural, and migratory experiences are resources from which knowledge can be built,” she said. “When a child brings another language into the classroom, a family history of migration, or a different way of understanding the world, they do not arrive with a deficit. They arrive with something that can expand what all of us learn.” 

The book invites readers to see those differences differently. 

Speaking another language is not a deficit, nor does migration diminish what a student knows. The ways students communicate and understand the world can become valuable resources for learning. Instead of asking only how students can adapt to school, Professor Parra and her collaborators ask another question: How can schools change to better serve the students who arrive? 

To explore this question, the book brings together different tools and pedagogical approaches, including Universal Design for Learning, differentiated instruction, multiple literacies, and translanguaging. While these approaches differ, they share a common idea: students learn, express themselves, and participate in different ways, and those differences can become part of the learning process rather than obstacles to it. 

Translanguaging, an area closely connected to Professor Parra’s academic work, refers to the use of all of a person’s linguistic resources for meaningful communication and is an important part of this conversation. Rather than treating the different languages and ways of communicating that students bring into the classroom as mistakes to be corrected, this approach recognizes them as resources that can support learning. 

One of the book's main contributions is its effort to bring these ideas into practice. Discussions about migration, inequality, and linguistic diversity often remain at the level of research and diagnosis. The challenge is to translate this knowledge into concrete decisions: how a class is designed, what materials are used, which forms of participation are recognized, and how relationships are built within a classroom and school community. 

As coauthor Juan Sánchez García noted during the presentation, the book is not intended to offer a single solution to the historical inequalities of the educational system. Instead, he described it as a tool for reflection and a starting point for improving educational practices through collaboration among schools, communities, academia, and society. 

“No text can, by itself, solve the historical inequalities of the educational system,” Sánchez García said. “We invite readers to see this book as a tool for reflection and as a starting point for improving educational practices.” 

During the book presentation, Sylvia Schmelkes del Valle, honorary researcher at Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico, highlighted the importance of having tools that can bring critical intercultural education into the daily work of schools. Silvia Elena Giorguli Saucedo, a sociologist and demographer who served as president of El Colegio de México from 2015 to September 2025, also spoke about the need to pay greater attention to the experiences of migrant children and young people. 

For many families on the move, school is one of the first doors into a new community and can play an important role in belonging and integration. But, as the book argues, inclusion does not begin when every student adapts to the same model. 

It begins when the school recognizes that the model can change, too. 

For Professor Parra, that transformation does not always require a large institutional reform. Educational equity can also begin with the everyday decisions educators make about whose voices are heard, what forms of knowledge are recognized, and who can see themselves reflected in the classroom. 

“Educational equity does not necessarily begin with major reforms,” Professor Parra said. “It can also begin with everyday pedagogical decisions about which voices we listen to, which forms of knowledge we legitimize, and who can see themselves in what happens in the classroom.” 

Sometimes, those decisions can take the form of small but meaningful actions. 

“Meaningful changes in the educational journeys of children often begin with a word of affirmation in their own language, an image in which they can see themselves reflected, or an activity that recognizes their family history as valuable knowledge,” Professor Parra said. “These small gestures can have an enormous transformative power in students' school experiences and in their lives. We wrote this book with hope in the power of our small actions.” 

And perhaps this is one of the most important questions at the heart of the work of Professor María Luisa Parra and her collaborators: What could happen if, instead of asking students to leave part of their identity at the classroom door, we built schools that could welcome everything they bring with them?