In the United States, adult education for emergent multilingual language learners (EMLL) is governed by the American Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA). The AEFLA defines literacy as an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in English. This definition erases the multilingual and multicultural assets that adult EMLLs bring to the classroom (and to society). Furthermore, adult education curricula are designed to prepare adult EMLLs for high school equivalency, postsecondary education, and employment; rarely, if ever does curricula address adult EMLLs as whole people by including the arts, linguistic and cultural pluralism, and global citizenship.To address this problem, I employed an instrumental case study design (Stake, 1995) to explore how adult EMLLs responded to a summer book club that sought to honor their transnational assets and wisdom. To do this, the book club used diverse children's and adolescent literature and incorporated translanguaging pedagogy (Garcia & Wei, 2014) into the literature circle model (Daniels, 2002) as an instructional strategy for promoting critical dialogue (Freire, 2018) among participants. The curriculum objectives for this book club were based on CASAS literary analysis standards that are rarely, if ever, used in adult education classes designed for EMLLs. The critical multilingual literacies framework (Espana & Herrera, 2020) was used alongside critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013) and critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014) to juxtapose participants' experiences with English-only ideologies that are prevalent in the US.The findings revealed that adult EMLLs responded positively to a multilingual classroom ecology that promoted translanguaging for meaning making. Participants selected reading materials based on the modality in which they attended the book club, cultural and linguistic relevance, and potential for informal family literacy practices. Even though this book club was designed to be transformative and liberatory, participants reported experiencing both the raciolinguistic chronotopes of anxiety and resistance (Flores et al., 2018). Overall, participants felt that the multilingual ecology of the book club promoted a safe and enjoyable learning environment. Therefore, I argue for an (un)patterning of adult education for EMLLs that defines literacy more broadly than English literacy and sets transmigrant and global citizenship goals rather than American citizenship goals.
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