The Tensions, Silences, and Desires Within Expected Relationships Between Racialized Bilingual Families and Schooling

• In Event: Engaging and Reimagining Racialized Notions of Citizenship, Participation, and Leadership in Bilingual Educational Settings

Abstract

Family engagement is often positioned as a straightforward solution to improving student learning and educational outcomes (Epstein, 2010; Henderson & Mapp, 2002). However, research has continuously highlighted how approaches and models of family engagement continue to uphold hegemonic Whiteness, a common sense ideal of what White identity should be (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013). As such, this presentation examines how racialized bilingual families are positioned in family engagement policy text and appropriation. It destabilizes dominant conceptualizations of family engagement expected in schools by showcasing how these definitions are produced and are producers of broader racialized discourses, systems, and relations in a setter-colonial and racist-capitalist state.

This paper is informed by Whiteness as Property (Harris, 1993), and a critical poststructuralist sociolinguistic orientation to raciolinguistic ideologies (García, Spotti, & Flores, 2016). For this study, I refer to Harris’s (1993) property functions of Whiteness to showcase how the racialization of language practices and social groups through state policy text and appropriation relates to the maldistribution of intangible and tangible benefits for racialized bilingual families. In relation, a critical poststructuralist sociolinguistic stance to raciolinguistic ideologies aims to denaturalize and interrogate the power relations that influence the racialized oppression of bilingual families within and through language.

This presentation draws from two-year ethnographic study of a bilingual program, two-way immersion, situated in the Greater Boston Area. Focal informants included three families, three school administrators, and three community-school partners. Data generation consisted of semi-structured interviews, state documents, and school and community-related artifacts. Data analysis was informed by Allan’s (2008) policy discourse analysis—an analytic method that merges established methods of qualitative and critical discourse analysis with poststructural policy analysis. This study augmented Allan’s approach, which is primarily used with policy documents, with interview data, drawing on Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2016) approach to interview analysis from a poststructural lens.

Findings reveal how the multiple and contradictory interpretations of family-bilingual school relationships are disentangled from broader socio-historical processes and inequities experienced by racialized bilingual families. For example, policy texts highlight families’ participation in school-related events as major indicators of family engagement. However, school administrators and educators recognize that the goals, leadership structures, and language practices within these types of participation in schools privilege families who are White, middle-class, and who are perceived as speaking a correct standardized version of English. School administrators and educators cite rigid guidelines from school district and state leadership officials as major reasons for their inaction of revising these racialized parent participation structures. Even when racialized bilingual parents are employees of the school, they are not considered as parent leaders with valuable skills, knowledge, and abilities. Instead, educational stakeholders regard these parents as compliant members who enforce predetermined institutional and policy goals.

Accordingly, this presentation attends to the 2021 conference theme by showcasing how educational stakeholders’ expectations of racialized bilingual families’ relations with schooling is linked to broader sociopolitical and material dimensions found within their larger communities. It aims to continue Lightfoot’s (1978) influential assertion of expanding the representations of parents and the types of relations between families and schools.

Author

• Jasmine Alvarado, Boston College