Mothers Are Powerful: A Community-Based Study of Language Policy, Identity, and Access

• In Event: Community-Based Action Research Toward Participatory and Transformative Educational Language Policy

Abstract

In US educational language policy, language minoritized parents have the right to meaningful participation in their children’s education (ESSA, 2016). However, theories of power in language policy (Tollefson, 2015; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996) do not yet adequately account for their roles in shaping, participating in, resisting, and transforming the policy process. This study centers the experiences of newly-arrived, predominantly Spanish-speaking mothers negotiating educational language policy on behalf of their children. It addresses a question arising from the mothers: why does their advocacy, which is powerful for social change-making in the larger community, lose efficacy within the local school system, and what changes are needed?
Investigation of these questions is underpinned by a critical understanding of power in policy (Tollefson, 2015) as shaped along lines of language, race, class, and other dynamic social identities on a sociostructural level (Liu, 2017; Rosa & Flores, 2017) and negotiated through interaction at district, classroom, and interpersonal levels (Hornberger & Hult, 2010). It extends theoretical frameworks of language policy (Ricento & Hornberger, 2006; Menken & Garcia, 2010) to account for the “enactments of self” (Moje & Lewis, 2003, p. 1983) of language minoritized parents as they engage with policy in home-school meetings. Centering the experiences and perspectives of parents as policy actors (Dorner, 2012) is a counterpoint to narratives that erase racialized, language minoritized perspectives in language education.
This study is part of a two-year, critical ethnography of language policy (Madison, 2005; Johnson & Hornberger, 2011) in a Midwestern school district with increasing demographics of first and second-generation immigrant students labeled English Language Learners (ELLs). The activist elements of the critical ethnography included collaborating with participants on research questions, understanding the issues from multiple community perspectives, and taking action to address the findings by connecting multiple stakeholders across layers of the educational language policy process. Ethnographic data collection methods were utilized, including participant-observation, insider accounts, fieldnotes, photos, videos, and recorded transcripts (Hammersly & Atkinson, 2011). Family participants in the study were four newly-arrived, predominantly Spanish-speaking mothers from Mexico and their school-age children as well as the District Equity Director, Equity Committee, three principals, and ELL and mainstream classroom teachers across several schools. I used discursive-centered methods (Farnell & Graham, 2011) to analyze how policy and identity were negotiated through social interaction across these spheres.
This study furthers understandings of parents as policy agents and reveals factors which mediate and obscure their agency. One finding is that the implementation of language access policies mediated access to policy negotiation for parents. Further, interpreters themselves were policy brokers (Flemmer, 2018) whose translation choices often aligned with dominant, deficit narratives of language minoritized parent involvement. In district-level policy conversations, whiteness worked to maintain this inequity. In response, the mothers and I identified action points and organized a community meeting to bring language minoritized families and the Equity Director into conversation. Findings demonstrate the role of the policy-shaping actions of racialized, language minoritized participants, showing that theories of power in policy without parents and students are incomplete.

Author

• Crissa Stephens, Georgetown University