Against the Deficit: How Latinx Students Resist the Devaluing of Their Language and Culture

• In Event: 34.095 - MTCC Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: 34.095-3 - The Sociopolitical of Latinx Education: Problemas, Promesas, y Posibilidades in an Era of Anti-Latinx Racism

Abstract

Scholars have documented and suggested that children carry much more than just their backpacks and lunch boxes when they come to school. The body of work on funds of knowledge illuminates how students bring their talents, stories, ideas, voices, and familial knowledge with them into classrooms (González, 2001; Moll & González, 1997). This study examines how deficit discourses, attitudes, and concepts of social hierarchy are also brokered into classrooms (Castagno, 2014; Cervantes-Soon, 2016; Vaught, 2011). Additionally, I examine how teachers can guide students to question and think critically about how they position others and how they are positioned by others.
Objective/Purpose & Perspectives
In classrooms where students from minoritized communities learn alongside students from dominant households, societal discourses around difference, race, and class are observable in students’ interactions. Societal inequities can be reconstituted or strategically interrupted on the classroom level (Darder, 2012). This project seeks to offer small ways in which classroom teachers can combat inequalities in two-way dual language programs (Cervantes-Soon, et al.) by intervening productively in improving the attitudes of students from non-Spanish speaking households.

Having observed a consistent pattern where students from the dominant community resist learning Spanish by expressing hatred towards the language, along with a pattern of silence among their Latinx, Spanish-speaking peers, I found myself questioning how to address this issue proactively, rather than reactively. This observation is consistent with research finding that two-way dual language classrooms tend to be centered on the needs of middle-class English-speakers (Palmer, 2009). While research on this dynamic exists, it is not typical to see research in which Spanish-speaking students are empowered to challenge both this dynamic and the underlying deficit ideologies that discount them as individuals along with their collective culture and language. Student empowerment is crucial in fostering agentive advocacy among Latinx students which may allow for them to continue to claim their rightful space at the center of two-way dual language classrooms (Cervantes-Soon, et al, 2017).

Modes of Inquiry/Points of View/Significance
In this study, I, the first grade teacher in a two-way dual language program, engage in action research to address how students talk about Spanish in the classroom space. This project involves designing and implementing a thematic unit around valuing language and confronting the history of language exclusion and segregation in schools. During implementation, daily reflections served as field notes. The data to be collected includes teacher documentation of verbal student reactions and student work samples. Relying upon field notes, student voices, and teacher reflection, we (teachers and students) together grapple with deficit discourses surrounding Latinx communities. In this study, language intersects with resistance to power structures, thus allowing students to draw from collective funds of knowledge and ways of knowing to challenge the presence of these power structures and deficit ideologies in their own classroom.

Author

• Megan Coupe, Austin Independent School District