Language and the Gentrifying City: Circulating Discourses About Languages, Speakers, Learning, and Public Schooling in a Two-Way Immersion Program

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Two-way immersion programs, which bring together language majority and language minority children with the goals of bilingualism and biliteracy for all, are becoming increasingly popular in the US (Collier & Thomas, 2004). The research literature points to the many benefits of this model, including higher academic achievement in both English and the target language for all students (Lindholm-Leary, 2012; Thomas & Collier, 2002); yet a growing number of studies have highlighted the problematic tensions that arise around issues of equity, power, and the role and status of Spanish (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Fitts, 2006; McCollum, 1999; Palmer, 2009; Scanlan & Palmer, 2009; Valdés, 1997). Within these critical studies, the processes that create fertile grounds for these programs to exist in the first place often go unexamined. Thus, through this study I aim to examine the social, demographic, economic, and ideological processes that facilitated the creation of a two-way immersion program in a public school within a gentrifying community. My goal is to investigate how the socio-political processes of gentrification and immigration, including the ideological discourses that go along with them, come to bear on the creation and development of a two-way program, and how these discourses in turn circulate and influence the everyday discursive practices in the classroom. Through ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, I will follow six focal children and their families and document their experiences in the program. Utilizing a linguistic anthropological frame, I will examine the circulating discourses regarding bilingualism, language and speakers; the motivation for different families for choosing this program; the linguistic and educational aspirations of families as well as their migratory trajectories; and finally, how these discourses are apparent in the day-to-day classroom life.

Author

• Sofia Chaparro, University of Pennsylvania