Latina Mothers’ Refusals of School-Sanctioned Family Engagement in Bilingual Programs Within Anti-Bilingual Education States

• In Event: Imagining Futurities in Bi/Multilingual Education Through Counter-Stories From Racialized and Minoritized Parents

Abstract

Purpose

The U.S. education system mispositions racially minoritized families as disengaged and incapable of supporting their children’s education (Wiley & García, 2016). Concurrently, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically transformed schooling responsibilities to parents/caretakers, particularly mothers from minoritized groups (Calarco et al., 2020; Cioè-Peña, 2022). In response, this paper focuses on the experiences of Latina mothers in two dual language bilingual (DLBE) programs from Arizona and Massachusetts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through counterstories, we highlight how they challenged the school’s positioning of them as “engaged parents.” In such a way, we report on Latina mothers’ nuanced forms of resistance to school-based family engagement in states with anti-bilingual legislative pasts.

Conceptual Framework

This paper leverages a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017) and counternarrative (Sólorzano & Yosso, 2002). A raciolinguistic perspective exposes the relationship between racism, racialization, and linguicism. Concerning family engagement, it highlights how racism and linguicism naturalize knowledges and communicative forms of families racialized as “white” as superior and those of racially minoritized families as “inferior.” Counternarratives amplify the voices of racially minoritized peoples and challenge harmful narratives about them (Sóloranzo & Yosso, 2002). As such, this paper utilizes counternarrative to highlight how Latina mothers resist and interrogate racist and linguicized framings of family engagement in their bilingual educational contexts.

Methods and Sources

This presentation reports on the experiences of two mothers from two ethnographic studies of DLBE programs in Arizona and Massachusetts from 2020-2022. Both mothers (Flor and Paloma) identified as Latina/Hispana and their heritage language was Spanish. The data sources include ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and fieldnotes and memos. We generated themes iteratively, combining relevant data from our contexts and re-categorizing data, where necessary, to explore points of divergence and themes that illustrated focal concepts. Additionally, we triangulated our findings to generate composite counterstories (Jenkins et al., 2021) of the mothers’ experiences.

Findings

Despite the institution of schooling’s efforts to bound parents’ roles and behaviors, the focal mothers critiqued and reconfigured instructional programming and school spaces. For instance, in Arizona, Paloma notes that parents/caregivers were interchangeably positioned as partners or supporters: “Most of the things teachers do, they just tell us, ‘Let's do this.’ …They do hear [us], but it's not like they tell you, ‘We're going to take a vote to…’” In Massachusetts, Flor, reported her concerns about her school maximizing instructional time while sacrificing students’ socio-emotional and physical well-being. Within her school aide role, Flor frequently had check-ins with her children and students across grade levels during lunch and recess time. Notably, these mothers expressed enduring social and material consequences due to their efforts to transform family-school relations.

Significance

This presentation attends to the 2024 conference theme by showcasing how focal mothers’ acts of resistance and perspectives demonstrate the importance of positioning racially minoritized mothers as critical leaders of change in schools (Ishimaru, 2019), especially those in states with anti-bilingual and xenophobic legislative histories. These mothers exemplify the necessity of attuning to forms of survival already occurring in schools as foundations for freedom and self-determination.

Authors

• Jasmine Alvarado, Brandeis University

• Yalda M. Kaveh, Arizona State University