From Language as Resource to Language as Struggle: Developing a Material Antiracist Vision of Bilingual Education

• In Event: 49.028 - The Meaning and Matter of Materialist (Anti)racisms in Educational Research

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the growth of two-way immersion programs. (Kim, Hutchinson, & Winsler, 2013). Proponents of these programs use a language as resource orientation (Ruiz, 1984) that argues that these programs offer cognitive benefits to students and prepare them for the global economy by exposing them to different cultures (Lindholm-Leary, 2000). Using case studies of three different initiatives currently underway in the School District of Philadelphia, this paper will provide a material antiracist critique of these programs, arguing that without a critique of the larger political economy these programs reproduce a neoliberal multiculturalism that may do more to reinforce rather than challenge white supremacy.
The paper introduces neoliberal multiculturalism through an analysis of a recent Coke commercial. In this commercial, the images of a multicultural America appear alongside a multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful.” In the national response that followed, white liberals were able to chastise the racism of white conservatives who condemned the commercial while continuing to profit from a racist system. That is, they could celebrate multilingualism while continuing to send their children to well-funded schools in segregated and gentrifying areas while language-minoritized students remain relegated to underfunded segregated schools.
The paper uses this analysis as an entry point for examining the ways that the discourse around bilingual education in the US gradually moved away from a perspective embedded in grassroots community struggle of the 1960s (language as right) toward a neoliberal multicultural framing (language as resource). This language as resource orientation has been complicit in the formation of neoliberal multicultural subjects that offer superficial support for becoming a “global citizen” and “embracing diversity” without offering a critique of the racialized hierarchies produced by neoliberalism (Petrovic, 2005).
The limits to this neoliberal multicultural framing of bilingual education are illustrated by portraits of three different initiatives currently underway in the School District of Philadelphia to expand the number of two-way immersion programs. The first initiative is at a school in a gentrifying neighborhood with a growing white middle class population. The second initiative is at a charter school in a segregated neighborhood with a predominantly Latino population. The third initiative is at 4 district schools in a segregated neighborhood with a predominantly Latino population. These portraits indicate that without larger political and economic changes those who are most likely to benefit are the white middle class students and the ones less likely to benefit are the the Latino students at segregated district-run schools.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania