Qualitative Research in Superdiverse Urban Schools

• In Event: 53.037 - Is Superdiversity the Way Forward for Educational Linguistics?

Abstract

This paper begins by examining U.S. migration after the 1965 immigration law reform, and resulting change in national origins from Western Europe to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the paper, author traces the reverberations of the U.S. migration context in her research agenda in two super-diverse high schools in traditional immigrant-receiving sites, i.e., Los Angeles and New York. It examines how the phenomenon of super-diversity plays out in everyday life, documenting teachers and students' classroom interactions.

The paper seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways can qualitative researchers represent super-diversity in classrooms? And, in what ways can qualitative researchers more broadly represent the kinds of diversity (e.g., ethnocultural, national origin, legal statuses, gender) that shape language practices in classrooms?

To answer these questions the paper advocates ethnographic research in super-diverse classrooms that includes horizontal research on the linguistic creativity and playfulness that youth in super-diverse schools engage in and vertical research on the ways that historical and institutional processes subject youth in super-diverse schools to various forms of policing. This two-prong approach to conducting research in super-diverse schools offers the possibility of more accurately representing the fluid language practices that emerge in super-diverse schools while also being sensitive to the power relations that go into managing this fluidity in schooling contexts.

The paper then uses ethnographic data from two studies conducted in super-diverse schools in Los Angeles and New York City to illustrate what such a two-prong approach to qualitative research might look like. Taking a horizontal view, the paper analyzes the ways that youth engaged their communicative repertoires in ways that drew on the resources available in their context of super-diversity to engage in language practices such as (1) language brokering to support novice participants in the classroom, (2) resource-pooling when making sense of content, and (3) linguistic play across national, cultural, and ethnic differences. Taking a vertical view the paper analyzes the ways that the language practices of students are policed in schools and the ways that this policing is connected to broader language policies connected to English-Only policies that have been produced as part of the pervasive xenophobia of US society.

The paper concludes that researching super-diversity is both about capturing the creative and colorful forms of social life that emerge in fascinating post-migration contexts, but also about not overly romanticizing such contexts and continuing to engage in the analysis of power. Using super-diversity as a lens opens up opportunities for adding studies of multiple identity affiliations to multicultural education—which has an already robust set of single-group studies that have emphasized race, and also language, but rarely the interaction of both. Super-diversity provides tools for avoiding essentializing research while simultaneously attending to racism and power.

Author

• Christine Brigid Malsbary, Vassar College