Racioliteracies: Race and Subjectivity in Spanish Language Curricular Materials

• In Event: Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education

Abstract

The Spanish language education of bilingual Latinx students, also referred to as Spanish heritage language learners, has been premised on arguments of their illiteracy. This paper advances a racioliteracies perspective that interrogates the discursive construction of literacy proficiency as a racialized process that limits the ways in which bilingual students are positioned and perceived as proficient in secondary school contexts. Combining insights from sociocultural models of literacy, critical race theory, and raciolinguistic ideologies, this paper explores available curricular materials in order to interrogate the power structures that restrict bilingual Latinx students from being perceived as literate and proficient. This objective supports AERA’s 2018 theme of “dreams, possibilities, and necessity of public education” by examining the degree to which the promise of public education is fulfilled when the bilingualism of bilingual Latinx students in secondary schools continues to be contested.

Everyday discourses regarding language and literacy proficiencies, their value, and significance shape our ideas of whose bilingualism counts and is valid and whose is not. Applying the racioliteracies framework I examine dominant representations that characterize proficiency in secondary Spanish language curricular materials, sensitive to the ways these characterizations position bilingual Latinx students. In doing so, I explore the ways in which dominant images create and reproduce, limit and restrict particular subjectivities. Further, I interrogate the ways in which these conceptualizations of proficiency may be complicit in the reproduction-of and resistance-to dominant language ideologies. To do so, I follow a textual analysis approach inspired by Elizabeth Allan’s (2008) feminist poststructural policy discourse analysis, an approach informed by poststructural theories of subjectivity and power (Foucault, 1972).

The textual analysis employed in this racioliteracies project is interdiscursive and considers the multiple and competing discourses that characterize the literacy proficiency of bilingual Latinx students in secondary schools. Three curricular resource categories have been identified. These resources are readily available to teachers of Spanish and offer glimpses into the prioritization of particular knowledges and the construction of subjects. They include: 1, national organization curricular standards; 2, a state model curriculum; and 3, world language textbooks that provide modifications for bilingual students.

On-going analysis of these curricular resources suggests that the concept of proficiency is not a discrete or apolitical social and academic construct. Instead, the dominant images and subject positions available to bilingual students in these curricular resources reinforce language and literacy hierarchies that maintain that bilingual student’s literacy practices are inappropriate for school contexts. These inappropriateness arguments are further related to racialized dominant images of bilingual communities in the U.S. as represented in curricular materials.

At a time when literacy models in the world language teaching and learning profession are starting to take place, it is critical that we examine the extent to which these approaches are responsive to the needs of bilingual Latinx students. This study does this by combining insights from sociocultural models of literacy, critical race theory, and raciolinguistic ideologies. As such, it offers a robust analysis of subject formation in the determination of appropriate speech and literacy practices

Author

• Erica Saldivar Garcia, University of Pennsylvania