Over the past decade, my research, teaching and service have focused on exploring how best to support the literacy and language development of emergent bilingual learners in K-12 classrooms, especially in the current climate of high stakes school reform and anti-immigration discourses. Since arrival at the University of Georgia, I have published and developed courses in three overlapping areas that relate to this focus: systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and SFL-informed genre pedagogy; critical performative pedagogy (CPP) in multicultural teacher education and K-12 education contexts; and critical discourse analysis (CDA) .I have used these approaches as tools to research and challenge social inequity in schools.