What Counts as Family Engagement in Schools? Raced, Classed, and Linguicized Relations Between Families and a Two-Way Dual Language Bilingual Program (Poster 36)

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

Abstract

Research that denaturalizes the dominant rhetoric of family-school relations in the U.S. often neglects the perspectives of low-income racially minoritized families, which perpetuates unfavorable educational outcomes and economic immobility for these families. In the field of bilingual education, there is an emergent body of research that incorporates the perspectives of low-income racially minoritized families to understand the relationships between families and two-way immersion (TWI) schools, where children from multiple racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds are educated together with the goals of bilingualism and biliteracy. A major limitation of these studies is that they present family engagement as a school-based matter rather than one that is historical, ideological, and political in nature. In response to this issue within this nascent research base, my dissertation situates the perspectives and experiences that families, from different ethno-racial and class backgrounds, have with a TWI program within the broader raced, classed, and linguicized power relations in U.S. society. It combines a historical analysis that documents the rhetoric of family-school relations during the institutionalization of bilingual education in the Civil Rights Era with a qualitative study of families in a TWI program. Informed by critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics and critical race scholarship, this study adds conceptual and methodological approaches to studies on the intersection of race, class, and language with the experiences of families in U.S. schools, and more broadly, to educational policy studies and sociological studies.

Author

• Jasmine Alvarado, University at Buffalo - SUNY