"Shifting Lenses Instead of Always Grinding Forward": Challenging Raciolinguistic Ideologies Through Ethnography

• In Event: Enacting Critically Conscious Policies in Practice: Four Cases From Dual-Language Bilingual Education Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper addresses how school leaders and researchers in DLBE can collaboratively develop critical consciousness by interrogating language education policies and practices through ethnographic lenses.

Theoretical Framework
We use a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017) that highlights the co-construction of race and language, attending to the pathologization of language practices of racialized bilingual students. Rather than changing or so-called fixing language practices of students, this framework pushes us to consider the white perceiving subject, and how we, as educators and scholars, might perceive students’ language practices through deficitizing structures and lenses.

We tie this to language policy, examining how educators navigating educational policies leads to and arises from raciolinguistic categories of learners. These are institutional designations for students based on language and are mediated by an institutional white listening subject position (Flores et al., 2018). Thus, we use a raciolinguistic perspective to examine language education policies and how school leaders make sense of such categories.

Methods and Data Sources
This paper is based on a nine-year ethnographic study at the Dual Language Charter School (DLCS), a Spanish-English K-8 bilingual charter school in an economically disadvantaged area of Philadelphia. Our focus was to understand how students make sense of language in a bilingual education program. A team of researchers conducted weekly participant observations, following a cohort of eight students from their kindergarten through eighth grade years. Other data collection methods included both informal interviews and formal semi-structured interviews with administrators, teachers, and students, as well as document and artifact collection.

We focus on a meeting between researchers and the school leadership team at DLCS during the sixth year of the study. We explore the ways that school leaders were in the process of developing critical consciousness by framing the discussion through critical lenses on language and by engaging with teachers’ descriptions of three focal students’ language practices.

Results
We began the meeting by presenting the example of Princess Charlotte from the United Kingdom being praised for her Spanish language proficiency that she was alleged to have developed through interacting with one of her hired caregivers. This example allowed school leaders to sit with and process the discomfort created by this contrast with discourses of languagelessness (Rosa, 2016) that permeate schooling experiences for language-minoritized students.
Next, we examined the presentation of data pertaining to certain students, highlighting the contradictions, tensions, and difficulties in grappling with raciolinguistic categories of learners, and in this case, students who were considered to be English-dominant and also labeled as English Learners. School leaders were able to tie deficitizing descriptions of students’ language practices to larger language education policy and practices and consider the complexities of addressing such ideologies in teaching.

Scholarly Significance
We highlight the importance of critical listening, engaging with discomfort, and social change as an ongoing practice, rather than a singular event. Furthermore, we argue for countering urgency and instead take up the necessarily slow and reflexive process of developing critical consciousness. This instance of practitioner-researcher dialogue presents one possible way to engage in such conversations with educators as policymakers.

Authors

• Jennifer Phuong, Swarthmore College
  Presenting Author

• Karla M. Venegas, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author