Questioned Belonging: Schools, Nation, and Portuguese-Speaking Youth Subjectivities in Toronto, Canada

• In Event: Translating Theory to Practice: Pedagogies of Raciolinguistics in the Classroom

Abstract

Language, specifically French and English, has informed the origins of multiculturalism policy and belonging in Canada and been linked to racializing practices of Othering of those outside this bilingual framework (Haque, 2012). Education continues to play a key role in consolidating a national identity based on unified culture(s) and linguistic capacity that offer a path to modernity and national belonging specifically in Canada for those who speak English or French (Haque, 2012; Thobani, 2007). Thobani’s triangulated formation of Canadian citizenship (2007) affirms that the exalted subject is one of assumed or earned (uncontested) belonging. Portuguese-speaking youths’ experiences in schools gesture towards a contested national belonging as well as a non-belonging in schools and education itself, which echoes emerging critiques in raciolinguistic perspectives and analysis.

Historically, the educational trajectories of Portuguese-speaking students in Toronto, Canada, have long been characterized by disproportionately higher rates of high school drop out (Presley & Brown, 2011). More recent reports have provided further context that Portuguese-speaking youth exhibit higher rates of suspension and special education identification, as well as lower rates of graduation and fewer applications to post-secondary education (Brown & Marmureanu, 2006; Brown, Newton & Tam, 2015). While statistically counted according to self-identification according to language, these youth are symbolically marked as linguistically Other for being heard speaking Portuguese in school. This practice renders their invisible minority status and questions their belonging in both school and country.

Field notes, interviews and focus groups from a year-long ethnography in a Toronto high school with a predominantly Portuguese-speaking student population reveal discursive (re)constructions of portugueseness and disciplinary practices of language use that target Portuguese-speaking students and (re)produce a linguistically mediated non-belonging in education that also speaks to notions of national non-belonging (Haque, 2012; Thobani, 2007). Teachers, support staff, students and parents both intentionally and unintentionally (re)construct a dominant depiction of portugueseness, which I have called the “renegade learner” whose language practices, among other behviours and dispositions, are deemed rebellious and unconventional to schooling and contest the “promise of education” for ethnoracial linguistic minority youth. Language, therefore, becomes a marker of difference, deficit and renegade student status. As a result, Portuguese-speaking students adapt several linguistic responses if not strategies in schools. Some, language renegades, resist the practices of surveillance and discipline while others, language concealers, avoid speaking Portuguese all together in class and elsewhere at school. These adaptive practices are not available to all Portuguese-speaking youth in all schools equally for reasons that gesture to race, class, citizenship status, and language. Renegade and adaptive practices both inform painful emotions that impact the social and cultural integration of some Portuguese-speaking youth at school.

This research draws attention to critical perspectives of multiculturalism policy and discourse and the notion of belonging in the context of education and the links, as well as consequences, this may have to national non-belonging. Claims of persistent underachievement for Portuguese-speaking youth are instead framed as policy recommendations to address the linguistic, cultural and pedagogical needs of Portuguese-speaking students and their communities in Toronto.

Author

• David A Pereira, University of Toronto