Toward the Critical Consciousness Goal: Constraints and Opportunities in Secondary Mandarin Chinese Dual Language Bilingual Education Classrooms

• In Event: Asian American Racialization: Critical Perspectives on Mandarin-English Bilingual Education

Abstract

Objectives
Critical consciousness is the foundational goal in DLBE programs (Dorner et al., 2022) to interrogate power structures and enact critical pedagogies for advocating social justice. Developing critical consciousness is important in Utah Mandarin Chinese DLBE programs that currently serve predominantly white English-speaking students (Sung & Tsai, 2019). Most Chinese DLBE research mainly focused on elementary programs (Lü, 2020) and instruction (Sung & Tsai, 2019) without a focus on social justice issues. Thus, this study explores secondary Chinese DLBE teachers’ practices and the constraints and opportunities for them to implement critical pedagogies and develop critical consciousness in the classroom.

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on theoretical concepts of critical consciousness (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Freire, 1993) to investigate Chinese DLBE teachers’ practices. Dorner et al. (2022) have identified practices that DLBE teachers can employ to develop critical consciousness, which include historicizing communities and ourselves, critical listening, embracing discomfort, interrogating power, affirming acompañamiento, and translanguaging. By using the tenets of critical consciousness, I examine secondary Chinese DLBE teachers’ classroom practices and explore the constraints and opportunities for them to implement critical pedagogies and develop critical consciousness in the classroom.

Methods
Employing a narrative inquiry approach (Riessman, 2008) and ethnographic methods (Creswell & Poth, 2018), this study focused on three secondary Chinese DLBE teachers’ reported and observed classroom practices. The study sites were two middle schools and one high school within urban and suburban districts. Three participating teachers differ in gender, educational background, teaching experiences, and immigration history. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews, semester-long classroom observations, reviews of teaching materials and classroom artifacts, and researcher reflections. Data analysis encompassed organizing the data, thorough reading, a priori and emergent coding (Saldaña, 2021), categorizing the codes into themes, and interpreting the findings.

Findings
Findings reveal the varied pedagogical practices of secondary Chinese DLBE teachers shaped by their past educational and teaching experiences. Teachers who primarily taught in higher education and followed standardized testing conformed to the state-mandated strict language separation policies and did not involve marginalized communities in classroom discussions. In contrast, teachers who have taught diverse student populations in K-12 settings employed translanguaging with multimodality and invited students to share their perspectives on marginalization. While the teachers embraced multiculturalism, they did not act explicitly to interrogate differences and inequities. Constraints included concerns about causing discomfort and conflicts with students, the influence of Chinese culture and politics, and insufficient professional learning about enacting critical pedagogies within the larger sociopolitical environment. Opportunities included disrupting stereotypes imposed on racialized bilinguals and communities, promoting translanguaging pedagogy, encouraging students to explore identities and cultivate a sense of belonging, etc. Each case will be discussed regarding specific examples for cultivating critical consciousness.

Scholarly Significance
This study contributes to the field of DLBE by revealing the diverse instructional practices of secondary Chinese DLBE teachers and how these practices reflect the constraints and opportunities in fostering critical consciousness in their classrooms. Implications for teachers, educators, policymakers, families, and communities dedicated to supporting critical consciousness efforts will also be discussed.

Author

• Nuo Xu, Bowling Green State University