Multiracial Mandarin: Heritage language and educational equity in racialized tension

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Multiracial Mandarin: Heritage language and educational equity in racialized tension

I present constructions of racial equity in a diverse, urban high school (Santa Maria High School), and its ramifications for its Mandarin world language program. I draw on sociological and historical conceptualizations of race as ideology, metalanguage, and schematic cognition in order to arrive at a theory of racial schemas and their mutually constitutive relationship with educational equity, as a cultural object that is constructed and negotiated by social actors within school environments. Empirically, I present contesting racial schemas that interrelate various racial categories in order to construct maps of equity at Santa Maria High School.

Author

• David Song, Stanford University