"Quietly Failing": Examining the Racialization of Students of Color and Its Implications for Educational Policies and Programs

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Policy: Helpful or Harmful for Latinxs?

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate that it is increasingly essential to consider racialization and the always-already racialized social systems (Bonilla-Silva, 1997, 2003/2018) that come to influence and shape the social construction of emergent bilingual students, particularly those from Chicano/Latino backgrounds. Through a critical discourse analysis of the public deliberations about an English Language Learner Draft Plan in a Midwestern community, I demonstrate that distinct views about educational policies and programs relied on the discursive construction of different student populations (i.e., Hmong, White, etc.). For example, constructions of Chicano/Latino students as “quietly failing” were linked to arguments for and against different policies and programs. This analysis has implications for more explicitly anti-racist work in language and literacy education in particular.

Author

• Mariana Pacheco, University of Wisconsin - Madison