“Downplay That Spanish Side”: The White Listening Subject in an Ethnically Homogenous Bilingual Program Cohort

• In Event: Overcoming the Gentrification of Dual Language Bilingual Education Programs

Abstract

Objectives & Theoretical Framework
While the expansion of DLBE programs has rightly called attention to inequities resulting from gentrification and power dynamics associated with differences in race, class, and language background (e.g., Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Valdés, 1997; 2018; Valdez, et al., 2016), less attention has been paid lately to programs serving ethnically and socioeconomically homogenous students. Such programs present particular challenges in trying to divide students as “native speakers” of English or Spanish despite all being on some point of a bilingual continuum (Valdés & Figueroa, 1994) and using frameworks of language separation to teach students with translingual repertoires (García, 2009, 2014). As a result, students in these maintenance bilingual program models may find themselves doubly marginalized – still facing the challenges of acquiring English in a society that prizes English monolingualism, and also grappling with notions of language purity for their Spanish language performance that devalue the communicative repertoires of US Latinx bilingual communities. Seeking to better understand this dynamic, this research was guided by the following questions:

What language ideologies are noticeably operating at the policy, curriculum, pedagogy, and interactional level for Latinx students and families in the upper grades of the focal DLBE program that were more homogenous than the gentrified lower grades?
How do students, educators, and parents in the program describe their experiences amid the school’s stated commitments to culturally and linguistically responsive bilingual education?

Methods
Through ethnographic participant observation in a bilingual PK-8 school in the Rocky Mountain West region of the United States, this work investigated how raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) shaped activity around learning and school governance to better understand how racializing dynamics can impact Latinx students even absent white, English-monolingual peers. Through analysis of transcribed classroom interactions; interviews with teachers, students, administrators, and caregivers; and of curriculum in the Spanish Language Development block of instruction, this paper highlights how debated constructs in second language research such as the native speaker paradigm (Bonfiglio, 2013) and monoglossic approaches to language learning (Valdés, 2018) remain deeply entrenched in DLBE to the detriment of racialized bilinguals (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000).

Results/Findings
Specifically, findings demonstrate that this bilingual program and its students lacked administrative support at the district level to cultivate students’ bilingualism despite the school’s stated aims, and that certain teacher ideologies embodied through Spanish language development curriculum and instruction positioned students’ bilingual repertoires as deficient because of their deviation from standardized forms. Promising changes in the program may emerge from recent professional development in translingual pedagogies, and recommendations are offered for how programs like this one, if improved, can be spaces of resistance against DLBE gentrification.

Scholarly Significance
Insights gained from this work can help realign maintenance bilingual programs with their original civil rights orientations (Flores & Garcia, 2017) by encouraging more student-centered and community-oriented language-in-education approaches that can help resist gentrification processes in DLBE.

Author

• Luis E. Poza, San José State University