"A Quién Le Toca": School Leaders of Racialized Bilinguals Negotiate Educational Responsibility

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

Abstract

School leaders of racialized bilinguals are part of a broader and deeply political history of community activists and organizers who have long navigated an educational regime steeped in hegemonic Whiteness (Flores, 2016). This presentation seeks to explore how school leaders in a dual language school engage with and navigate codified notions of success while also working to humanize and serve their students as they work to introduce a new school vision statement that seeks to valorize the language practices of their students and meet state standards. The purpose of this presentation is to tease out the tensions that arise from school leaders as they come to inhabit and resist a white listening subject position (presenter 2 et. al) that is intent on modifying the language practices of students.

DeMathews and Izquierdo (2019) introduced a social justice framework that bilingual school leaders should adopt to “engage stakeholders, collect and analyze a broad range of data, develop new systems that support inclusive and linguistically appropriate teaching and maintain continuous reflection, evaluation, and improvement” (2019, p. 191). Cervantes-Soon (2017) and Chávez-Moreno (2019) further extend the conversation by proposing the development of critical consciousness as central to equity-oriented leadership work that seeks to explicitly address issues of power, race, and gender. This presentation builds on this literature as a way to understand how educational responsibility comes to be conceptualized and actualized through a social justice framework.

This presentation draws from a seven year-long ethnographic study at Dual Language Charter School, a racially-segregated inclusive bilingual charter school in Philadelphia. Participants for this particular presentation were the fifteen members of the school leadership team. Methods included participant observation and document collection. This particular presentation relates to three meetings in which the leadership team introduced the new school vision statement to the broader leadership team.

The vision statement introduced was “100% of our students will grow more than one academic year annually in all subjects to be measured by the state exam.” The data indicates two points. One is that school leaders continue to position each other as responsible for closing gaps—achievement and language gaps perpetuating appropriateness based approaches to language instruction while emphasizing their commitment to language diversity. Also, the study shows that the members of the leadership team are positioned as either responsible for English instruction or as responsible for Spanish instruction and this contributes to an ongoing discourse of the strict separation of language for instruction (Palmer et al. 2014) and the strict separation of responsibility for each language. Members of the leadership team felt compelled to continue to fit students to an idealized version of bilingualism because of the reliance on standardized metrics of success.

The findings demonstrate that the effects of the white listening subject are not superficial and extend far beyond the discomfort that school leaders of racialized bilinguals may experience. Particularly, it asks educators and researchers to consider how educational responsibility is operationalized through school policies and how this intersects with language and race.

Author

• Karla M. Venegas, The University of Pennsylvania