Language Policy and Social Justice: How Bilingual Teachers Use Policy Mandates to Their Own Ends

• In Event: 63.081 - Language Policy for Social Justice: Challenging Educational Inequality for Emergent Bilinguals

Abstract

We focus on the way two teachers at distinct schools in a Texas district that implements top-down dual language bilingual education (DLBE), used language policy (LP) for social justice. Marisol was a public school pre-K teacher with nine years of experience, including six years implementing DLBE in two different districts. Raquel, with 35 years’ experience in transitional BE classrooms, was experiencing her second year as a third grade DLBE teacher. Both teachers were highly committed to meeting the needs of their emergent bilingual students (García, 2009), yet they held distinct views on the official and unofficial district- and school-level LP. We explore how the teachers made sense of the layers of LP, and rejected, embraced or negotiated policies in making instructional decisions.

Language policy implementation in schools often involves a top-down mandate, but is a multi-layered process; various actors impact implementation (Spolsky, 2004; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007). In classrooms, teachers must interpret the adopted LP of the district or other entities, and meet local administrators’ expectations. They negotiate these layers with their own ideologies and experiences (Erickson, 2004; García & Menken, 2010). We examine how both teachers, in vastly different ways, implement and negotiate the layers of LP as they pursue their own ideas of social justice and equity for their students’ education.

Interviews, field notes and video recordings of teachers’ classroom practices were collected during the 2013-2014 school year. We identified recurring themes utilizing the constant comparative method (Miles & Huberman, 1994), then drew on discourse analysis (Johnstone, 2008; Erickson, 2004) to examine the (dis)connections between the way the teachers defined DLBE and LP implementation, and how they implemented these with their students.

Although their approaches differed, both teachers intentionally manipulated the LP context to push forward their own agenda for academic success and social justice for their emergent bilingual students. Marisol supported DLBE policy and implemented with fidelity – “tenemos que seguir el programa (we must follow the program)”; she understood DLBE broadly due to her experience working in several contexts. Her school was aligned with the district’s DLBE policy, a key reason she chose to work there. Raquel, by contrast, was distrustful of the motivations behind adopting DLBE, believing it would most benefit the white, middle-class families who were gentrifying her school. Her school’s (unofficial) LP was not aligned with district DLBE policy, pushing teachers toward English only in late elementary grades. Raquel rejected both official and unofficial policies, taking advantage of the space created by the contradictions between them, and drawing on her own ideologies and experiences to make use of her students’ bilingual linguistic repertoires.

Enrichment-based language policy is complicated by the multi-faceted nature of implementation. Our findings reinforce the need for a nuanced understanding of teachers as language policy makers. Teachers are “making" policy in their classrooms grounded in their ideological leanings (García & Menken, 2010); they also use LP to their own ends – toward social justice through multilingual education.

Authors

• Deborah K. Palmer, The University of Texas - Austin

• Kathryn I. Henderson, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Christian Ellen Zuniga, The University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley