Racial Justice Is Curricular Justice: Imagining New Curricular Frameworks for World Language Education

• In Event: Racial Justice in Multilingual Education: What Is It and How Do We Realize It?

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes

Given the racialized nature of language study (Anya, 2016; Rosa, 2018), the world language (WL) classroom is uniquely positioned as a space to address critical issues of racial justice. Although the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (The National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015) are not explicitly grounded in critical frameworks, critique and expansion of the frameworks presented in the standards can lead to more critical, justice-oriented approaches (Johnson & Randolph, 2015). Nonetheless, language that specifically addresses race and antiracism is noticeably absent from the World-Readiness Standards and even from other curricular frameworks that specifically address justice-oriented and anti-oppressive pedagogies (e.g., the standards and anti-bias framework from the organization Learning for Justice [2022]). This paper addresses this need for a clearly articulated curricular vision for racial justice in the discipline of WL education.

Theoretical Framework

The study examines racial justice in WL curricula by drawing upon a variety of critical, multidisciplinary frameworks, including critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), abolitionist and liberationist pedagogies (Love, 2019), linguistic justice (Baker-Bell, 2020), and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), with a specific focus on frameworks that center Blackness and Indigenousness as anticolonial praxis (Shield et al., 2020).

Recognizing that there are several facets of anti-oppressive pedagogies in addition to antiracism, this paper focuses specifically on Black liberation in the Spanish curriculum as a way to enact an antiracist language learning framework. Given this specific subcontext, I also draw upon raciolinguistics (Rosa, 2018), critical language awareness (Quan, 2020), and translanguaging pedagogies (García, 2013) as they relate to the teaching of Spanish as a WL.

Data Sources and Methods

Data sources include: 1) the discipline-specific national standards document for WL; 2) interdisciplinary, justice-oriented curriculum guides and frameworks; and 3) state-specific WL standards for those states that have adopted their own discipline-specific standards. The study is a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010) that employs a Critical Method of Document Analysis (CMDA) (Sankofa, 2022) to examine how these curricular documents explicitly and implicitly conceptualize the constructs of “race” and “racial justice” and what the implications of such conceptualizations are with regard to broader curricular goals of racial justice.

Results and Significance

Key findings from the analysis indicate: 1) an overall omission of race in curricular documents in favor of broader, and perhaps less controversial, race-adjacent terms such as “culture” and “diversity;” 2) simplification and overgeneralization of the level of critical engagement expected from learners at novice and intermediate proficiency levels (even though learners at those proficiency levels make up the majority of WL students); and 3) a disconnect and watering down of the discourse associated with contemporary racial justice movements.

The paper concludes by imagining how contemporary WL curricular models might embrace the language that is associated with contemporary Black liberation movements (e.g., Black lives matter, anti-racism, anti-White supremacy) to engage in the critical study of these issues in ways that are compatible with current curricular models, that promote language proficiency, and that also boldly center such issues at the forefront of WL study.

Author

• L.J. Randolph, University of Wisconsin - Madison