Becoming Language Policy Makers in Science and Education

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

Abstract

Teachers are policymakers who enact liberatory and/or oppressive language policies in multilingual classrooms—‘policies’ which are constituted within their own personal linguistic histories, educational experiences, and worldviews, as well as within local policy contexts (Menken & García, 2010; Heineke, 2015). We are interested, therefore, in how novice teachers are ‘becoming language policymakers’ in linguistically hegemonic schooling contexts. Findings were generated from our critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010) of transcribed interview and classroom observation data from preservice teachers, purposively sampled from three different university-based science teacher education programs across two different states. At the time of our study, these states shared common hegemonic English-only instructional policies (California’s Proposition 227, Arizona’s Proposition 203), with one state, Arizona, enacting and enforcing some of the most restrictive language education policies in the U.S., including a four-hour mandatory English-only instructional block (Structured English Immersion, or SEI) focused largely on the decontextualized teaching of English grammar, reading, writing, and oral language for any student classified as an Arizona English Learner (Combs, 2012). Not only do these English-only policies racially marginalize Latinx students, they also create often insurmountable barriers to SEI students’ abilities to enroll in advanced science coursework required for high school graduation and/or university admissions (Author, 2018; Gamoran, 2017).

Our analysis revealed that preservice teachers articulated a range of positionings in terms of language policy, ideology, and schooling with emergent bilingual students, as demonstrated in the following sample excerpts:

Max: I feel like…there’s a lot of negative emphasis on the process of assimilation and the process of having people learn English, like that’s a negative thing, and that confuses me because America is an enormous country, and predominantly, like we speak English, like that’s like an indisputable fact, right? ... So I’m having a really difficult time like trying to recognize the negatives.

Rebecca: We don’t value the efforts of Spanish-speaking students... we treat them like they're catching up instead of rewarding them for all of the extra work and achievements that they are doing. Like I just think that’s racism.

Monica: Personally, I’m against [emergent bilingual students] being in the [SEI] classroom for four hours. I've seen my friends when I was in high school, which was like five years ago so not that long ago, I had friends who would be in the four-hour classrooms and I would see how they wouldn't have all their classes [like science]….They need more than just that four hours of English-only.

Rodrigo: [In my school district], you’ll [have to] be able to speak English at least at a basic level, before you even enter anything else [i.e., other courses]. All the ELLs I think take math and science together...I think that’s the way to go.

These findings reveal that a focus on preparing preservice teachers to shelter content instruction such as science for emergent bilingual students without attention to the racialized policy contexts in which they teach does little to dismantle racist and hegemonic language ideologies in science and/or schooling.

Authors

• Caroline Thompson Spurgin, University of California - Merced

• Sara E. Tolbert, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury

• Mary Carol Combs, The University of Arizona