Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education is an emerging book project that examines the institutionalization of bilingual education in the Post-Civil Rights Era. In contrast to traditional framings of bilingual education, which typically position the expansion of bilingual education programs as inherently socially transformative, this book adopts a raciolinguistic perspective that points to the ways that the institutionalization of bilingual education failed to address the underlying racial position of communities of color and thereby inadvertently became a tool for the perpetuation of the white supremacist status quo. The major objectives of this book are as follows: (1) to situate the institutionalization of bilingual education within broader political struggles emerging in the late 1960s related to community control of schools and other institutions, (2) to examine the ways that the professionalization of bilingual education served to divorce it from these broader political struggles, (3) to trace the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education both served as a precursor to contemporary neoliberal education reforms and has been shaped by the growing hegemony of neoliberalism in education and (4) to lay out a vision for an alternative approach to bilingual education that situates efforts to expand these programs within broader political and economic struggles.

This poster will describe the characteristics of a raciolinguistic genealogy, the theoretical and methodological approach that informs the book. It will then provide a glimpse into how this framework is being used to inform the analysis in the three different parts of the book. The first part of the book uses bilingual education as a point of entry for documenting the political incorporation of the demands of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that obscured structural barriers confronting communities of color by reframing the demands towards individualist narratives of deficiency and social mobility. The second part of the book makes the link between this political incorporation of the demands of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of neoliberal educational reforms. Using examples from a range of contexts, with a particular focus on California, New York City and Philadelphia, these chapters trace the “echoes” of community control activism within contemporary neoliberal educational reform. The third part of the book synthesizes the different threads and makes a call for reclaiming a race-radical vision of bilingual education that situates struggles for bilingual education within a broader efforts to dismantle white supremacy and global capitalism.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania