Multiracial Mandarin: Heritage Language and Educational Equity in Racialized Tension

• In Event: Race, Coloniality, and Occupation: Interrogating Dominant Logics and Conceptualizing Emancipatory Possibilities

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to surface social and discursive contradictions present in Mandarin world language education, as well as in Asian-American communities that use Chinese languages. Specifically, it surfaces the contradictions between, on one hand, the affordances and needs of Mandarin heritage language students (who are almost always Asian-American), and on the other hand, the racial framework of conventional “progressive” models of educational equity that tend to either elide students in the category of “Asian,” or represent them, as a category, as “advantaged” in terms of academic achievement. In other words, this paper asks, through ethnographic research of teachers and students in a Mandarin high school program: For whom and what social purposes is Mandarin language education intended?

Author

• David Shuang Song, University of Oklahoma