Race and Language Learning in Multicultural Canada

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

Featuring qualitative and conceptual inquiries on culture, language, citizenship, and other social categories as manifested in second language learning in Canadian institutional contexts (e.g., university, school, and church), this session aims to explore ways of conceptualizing facets of learning through a lens of racialization, racism, and intersections with other categories which underpin social structures, educational practices, and public policies in the past and the present. Five papers focusing on a variety of second language settings explore how the official policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework have constructed a linguistic and racial hierarchy and thus limited multilingual education, how newcomer and oldtimer “visible minorities” (re)position themselves in a racial order, and how culture, language, and citizenship become proxies for race.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Second Language Research

Chair

• Ryuko Kubota, The University of British Columbia

Papers

• Forging White Settler Nationalism and Entrenching a Hierarchy of Racialized Belonging in Canada - Eve Haque, York University

• Race and Culture in the Critical Language Classroom: Why “Doing the Stereotype Thing” “Never Works for Me” - Ena Lee, Simon Fraser University

• Everyday Racism in Canadian Schools: Ideologies of Language and Culture Among Korean Transnational Migrant Students in Toronto - Hyunjung Shin, University of Saskatchewan

• “Westerners” of Chinese Descent: Exploring the Intersection of Language, Race, Religion and Immigrantization - Huamei Han, Simon Fraser University

• For English Speakers Only: An Early Mandarin Bilingual Program in Vancouver - Ryuko Kubota, The University of British Columbia; Ai Mizuta, The University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington