Colonial Legacies in Education: Historicizing the Bilingual Child of Color as an Educational Problem

• In Event: Interrogating the Racialization of the Language of Science and the Science of Language

Abstract

This historical study begins with an educational event during the Obama era. The US Departments of Justice and Education (2015) co-released a “Dear Colleague Letter” to commemorate the Title VI ruling of the Civil Rights and Equal Educational Opportunities Acts for students of “limited English proficiency.” The letter mandates that school districts “avoid unnecessary segregation of English Learner students” (p. 8, emphasis added), with the aim of ensuring that these students can participate meaningfully and equally. What are the logics that make it reasonable to still maintain the segregation of some linguistically diverse children as a ‘necessary’ pedagogical practice for equity and justice? To address this question, I examine how bilingual children of color emerged as an object of scientific scrutiny that appeared to require tiered and separate instruction in the early 20th century.

Drawing on perspectives from the historiography of race and language (Benes, 2008; Hutton, 1999, 2005; Torres-Rouff, 2012), I focus on how the Bilingual Child of Color became a knowable component of reality in educational research. Specifically, I focus on how the experiences of linguistically and racially diverse children became a matter of concern and intervention for social and psychological scientists.

In this history of the present (Popkewitz, 2013), the archival sources focus on educational research and scientific reports pertaining to linguistically and racially diverse communities and their children (1915–1940). The analysis examines how categories of children doubly demarcated as linguistically and racially different became positioned as social and educational problems (Foucault, 1995; Rose & Valverde, 1998). This endeavor entails the analysis of the educational and scientific practices that contributed to this problematization. I examine how these technologies of social science were interlaced with cultural theses about proper modes of living that circulated in early 20th-century educational research and social reforms.

My analysis highlights how the categories produced around linguistically and racially diverse children shifted between the “foreign-speaking” child (Pintner & Keller, 1922), the “immigrant” child (Lima, 1928), the “Mexican” child (Sheldon, 1924), and the “Spanish-American” child (Haught, 1931). What made these categories appear pedagogically salient were a set of tools developed in educational psychology that functioned to inscribe differences and ascribe traits in ways that racialized these categories as inherently different from the linguistically proficient American child. These social science practices permitted new distinctions like “language handicap” and “language difficulty” (Haught, 1931), “linguistic ability” (Mitchell, 1937), and “truly bilingual” vs. “unilinugual” (Yoshioka, 1929). Language testing and measurement became assembled as key scientific and pedagogical technologies in the racialized segregation of linguistically diverse communities.

This study contributes to a growing body of research concerned with unsettling the labels that populate schools and essentialize the linguistic and racial experiences of students (Baquedano-López, 2019; Flores & Rosa, 2015). This study contributes to these efforts by uncovering the role that psychological sciences played in the production of linguistically and racially diverse children as an educational problem, and how these children and their homes became a biopolitical site of intervention for the purported betterment of their communities and the nation.

Author

• Belén Hernando-Lloréns, University of Iowa