Home/Language/Loss: An Ethnography of Home Language Policy in Los Angeles High Schools for Recently Arrived Immigrant Students (Poster 35)

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

Abstract

The Los Angeles Unified School District has undertaken an experiment in the education of recently-arrived immigrant students learning English. Over the 2021-2023 school years, the district opened three new high school Academies explicitly tasked with centering students’ home languages to support their success in school. The students and educators in these Academies are predominately Latinx and 25% of students reported a Mayan language as their home language. Recognizing that Indigenous languages and the home languages of people from racialized communities represent knowledge- and value-systems historically excluded from and suppressed by schools, this dissertation asks what language policy in newcomer schools teaches about the futures we build with and for marginalized young people. Based on two years of ethnographic research across the three new Academies, this study examines the official and practiced policies governing students home languages and the possibilities for college, career, and community participation those policies facilitate or constrain. By analyzing classroom observations, student work, more than 75 interviews with students, educators, and district leaders; and participant- observation in a youth-organizing group, this study argues that embracing newcomer’s home languages is not a best practice to be applied to otherwise unchanged educational programs. Given, the Department of Education’s requested 35% funding increase for its English Language Acquisition program, bringing the total budget over $1 billion, to support English learners through “a greater emphasis on multilingualism that embraces students’ native and home languages,” this study offers practice-based policy lessons about what it means to “embrace” newcomer’s home languages.

Author

• Kyle Halle-Erby, University of California - Los Angeles