81.013 - Genealogical Perspectives on Bilingual and Heritage Language Education as Sites for Regulating Racial Difference

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium presents critical genealogies of bilingual and heritage language education in Canada and the United States. The starting point for each study is an understanding of how language-education policies, as well as public and scholarly deliberations of them, are the sites of racialized conflicts over the distribution of educational resources and the production of racialized assumptions about the ideals of language education. The papers consider in turn the Bilingual Education Act and public and scholarly discourse about heritage language education in the US, and the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, Canada. These historical analyses challenge us to reconceptualize the framing and practice of language education today.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 3: Language and Literacies

Chair

• Jeff Bale, University of Toronto - OISE

Papers

• The Birth of Accountability: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of the Bilingual Education Act - Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania

• "But They're Illiterate": Discourses of Illiteracy in Spanish Heritage Language Education - Erica Saldivar Garcia, University of Pennsylvania

• Heritage Language Education and the Regulation of Racial Difference in 1970s Ontario - Jeff Bale, University of Toronto - OISE

• Implementing Policies for Heritage Language Education in the Toronto Board of Education - Mayo Kawaguchi, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Eve Haque, York University