Moving Beyond Race-Evasive Discourses to Centering Race-Cognizant Discourses Within ESOL Spaces

• In Event: Preparing Antiracist ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Professionals: Creating Racially Just Educational Spaces for Multilingual Learners

Abstract

The demographics of school-aged children in the United States is changing quickly, evolving to include an increased number of multilingual learners (MLs) acquiring English as an additional language. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “In the fall of 2019, more than 5.1 million [MLs] were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, representing 10 percent of total student enrollment” (MPI, n.d.). This shift in population has caused the need for the inclusion of more content-and-language integration courses in teacher education programs, but also the need for specialized professional development (PD) opportunities for practicing teachers.

In this session, the presenters will present findings from the qualitative data analysis from an online PD series, specifically, the “Race and Education” eWorkshop. Within these sessions, in-service teachers and other K-12 educators unpacked and investigated their own positionalities and pedagogies in regards to topics that center whiteness, race, and racism by watching videos, participating in online discussions, and producing lesson plans that demonstrated their learning about race and racism. Participants reflected upon their understanding of the intersecting dynamics of race, racism, and language learning in educative settings, and after having completed this training, the goal was that they have a better understanding of the overlapping effects of race and language acquisition in order advance efforts towards curating antiracist pedagogies and discussions within mainstream classrooms.

This work draws from Chang-Bacon’s analysis of Foucault’s (1980) postructural framework, exploring how teachers discussed topics of race and racism and the conditions under which these discourses become relevant and irrelevant. A poststructural analysis highlights the relationship among power, influence, and whiteness in ways that draws attention to language and racial hierarchies. These hierarchies are made hyper-visible, “which counterintuitively leads to its invisibility” (Linder, 2018, p. 44). This invisibility could thwart attempts at fully embracing antiracist pedagogies and discussions within ESOL classrooms. With this as an understanding, raciolinguistic perspective was also employed, incorporating a critical race lens. According to Rosa and Flores (2020), a raciolinguistic perspective interrogates the historical and contemporary connections between language and race with influences from European colonization and its consequences on linguistic and racial formations in the United States. Further, looking to Critical Race Theory (CRT), raciolinguistic and poststructural perspectives are expanded upon in ways that compliments similar themes rooted in the scholarship of CRT.

In analyzing participants’ assignments from the Race and Education eWorkshop, Chang-Bacon’s (2020) tensions – Erasing vs. Naming, Bracketing vs. Framing, and Deferring vs. Disrupting – provided a conceptual framework to guide analysis of course documents to determine if and how the educators evolved as a result of the PD. Preliminary findings from this qualitative study demonstrate that participants became more comfortable with engaging in topics of race and racism and that the eradication of “race-evasiveness does not occur by happenstance or through passive omission” (Chang-Bacon, 2022, p. 20). Rather, then dismantling of race-evasiveness involves active, discursive effort as demonstrated throughout the analysis of participants' assignments and discussions.

Authors

• Karen L. Terrell, Loyola University Maryland

• Joy Beatty, Virginia Commonwealth University