The politics of well-intentioned citizenship education in California

• In Event: The hidden side of emancipation: Historicizing well-intentioned educational projects.

Abstract

1. Objectives
This study examines the ideological construction of language and literacy practices in adult English as a Second Language (ESL) citizenship class for naturalization. Naturalization refers to the processes required for U.S. citizenship undergone by lawful permanent residents after meeting extensive federal requirements. This study focuses on a school district’s partnership with a community college serving Latinx immigrants trying to gain U.S. citizenship in Southern California. I argue that this partnership, though framed as promoting civic integration, ultimately reinforces colonial logics by using literacy to socialize immigrants into low-wage employment.

2. Theoretical Framework
Drawing from sociocultural learning theory (Scribner, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978; Engeström, 2006), this work follows the Politics of Learning Writing Collective (2017)’s call to view learning as inherently political. Language learning in this context is not neutral and deeply tied to a settler-colonial project that defines “productive citizenship” through English proficiency and economic productivity. Judith Butler’s (2006) theory of performativity and Glissant’s (1997) “right to opacity” guide my analysis to show how language itself functions as a tool for indoctrination but also as a site of resistance.

3. Methods and Data Sources
Drawing from a larger study including archival research and ethnographic research in ESL citizenship classes in northern and southern California, this project uses participant observations, interviews, cultural artifacts in the forms of notebooks, and reflective group interviews. Participant’s reflections, in Spanish, offer insight into how classroom policies and pedagogical practices, especially rules of English-only, shape experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and identity formation. I center participants' voices and resist translating their words into English to honor their right to opacity and contest assimilationist logics.

4. Findings
By analyzing student reflections, their understandings and contradictions, my findings show how students from the class respond to the ESL citizenship classroom’s rigid rules of order by instantiating performative belonging and performative othering. I use the term performative belonging because no one—especially nonwhites being indoctrinated as neoliberal citizens—truly belongs. Performative belonging also necessitates othering. I use performative othering to show how students in ESL citizenship classrooms engage in the practice of othering, in an attempt to belong. For example, students engage in performative belonging by writing and agreeing with the majority of white America about voter ID laws. By extension, they are also engaging in the practice of performative othering—by agreeing to voter ID laws, they are othering the people voter ID laws exclude, mainly Black people and Indigenous people (Anderson, 2018). Yet students are not passive, they poke fun at the rigidity of English instruction, mock pronunciation drills, and mimic the teacher’s insistence on proper speech.
5. Significance
This paper contributes to scholarship on language education, citizenship, and racialized ideologies by showing how ESL naturalization classes function as quiet tools of assimilation. We have much to learn from ESL citizenship students in how they sustain but also rupture the ideological imposition of the citizen. They show us how these spaces come to define citizenship as an English speaker that contributes to the economy- and doesn’t ask too many questions.

Author

• Karen Villegas, University of California - Berkeley