Culture in Bilingual and Multilingual Education: Conflict, Struggle, and Power

• In Event: 65.043 - Bilingual and Multilingual Education: Current Practices and Future Prospects for Promoting Justice, Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education

Abstract

In this paper, the authors acknowledge cultural diversity as foundational in bilingual/multilingual education. Because culture is learned, biculturalism is one of the goals of bilingual education. However, the authors argue that culture and its relevance to education and particularly bilingual/multilingual education has been misunderstood theoretically and misapplied in practice. Often culture has been either assumed as a given element of or as peripheral to language and education. The paper discusses how both assumptions have supported education practices that ignore the intricate relationships of language and culture and the serious consequences of these assumptions to the education of already underserved populations.

A central perspective the authors take in this paper is that culture is “dynamic, multifaceted, embedded in context, influenced by social, economic, and political factors, created and socially constructed, learned, and dialectal” (Nieto 2010). As such, becoming bicultural constitutes a complex process that requires attention in theory and practice as well as in education research. Among the cases discussed in this paper, the authors note that when internalizing at least two cultural systems, “sometimes their inherent values can be contradictory or even diametrically opposed.” The understanding of this process, the author discuss, allow us to further explore challenges and affordances of bilingual/multilingual education.

What perspectives can help enhance our knowledge of such complexity and what implications these perspectives have for our understandings of the theory and practice of bilingual/multilingual education? By conducting a review of research in bilingual education policy and programs across the globe, the authors discuss views and practices that challenge assumptions about cultural diversity in the United States and in countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Additionally, based on the critical review of these different empirical studies, the authors note the scholarly significance of these studies and argue for more critically-based research examining local cultural practices to understand the complex relationships of language and culture in bilingual and multicultural classrooms.

Author

• Laura A. Valdiviezo, University of Massachusetts