Intertwined Gentrification Processes of U.S. Neighborhoods and Bilingual Education: Uncovering Possibilities of Resistance and Transformation

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 7:45 am
  In Poster Session: Innovating Curricular Designs for Bilingual Teacher Education in the US: Programs, Policies and Partnerships

Abstract

Objectives: Scholars in Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) have been using the concept of gentrification as a metaphor for the processes by which privileged families (primarily White, monolingual English speakers) have mainstreamed and occupied DLBE narratives, spaces, and resources during the 21st-century boom in DLBE programs (Delavan et al., 2021a; Valdés, 1997). The purpose of this poster is to deepen this knowledge on DLBE gentrification in a more direct comparison of neighborhood real estate patterns in U.S. cities with DLBE programming and policy. Our framework draws on Anyon’s (2005) and Flores and Chaparro’s (2018) call for a materialist, anti-racist approach to advocating for equitable educational policy as well as research on neoliberal transformations of U.S. communities (Smith & Stovall, 2008; Stovall, 2013). Indeed, we see increased knowledge of literal (anti-)gentrification as relevant to DLBE teacher education because (a) there may be more solution-oriented ideas to discover in gentrification’s parallels with, (b) it affects the living conditions of the families served by DLBE programs, and (c) it can enrich the social studies content knowledge of DLBE teachers will be enriched.
Theoretical Framing: To connect neighborhood and DLBE gentrification, we map out processes occurring in U.S. neighborhoods within critical gentrification scholarship to deepen understanding of the gentrification currently rearranging DLBE politics in both material and discursive ways (Lipman, 2011; Menken et al., 2024). From this analysis, we found that gentrification of DLBE follows a pattern of three processes that occur in U.S. city gentrification which we named divestment, individual resettlement, and institutional expropriation. Yet many neighborhoods, towns, and cities are successfully resisting these patterns and transforming gentrification into something closer to win-win racial and economic transformation. As such, we conclude with three counter-processes in which official policy and grassroots activism remedying gentrification in U.S. neighborhoods can inform pathways for bilingual teacher education to help remedy the gentrification of DLBE by Whitestreamed, English-centered, and money-centered narratives, voices, and bodies.
Findings and Significance: Understanding positive resistance to gentrification in some U.S. cities, this poster session seeks to prepare DLBE teachers and teacher educators with an awareness of the need for transformation of inequity rather than simply equity of access to current systems. This transformation frame is significant in that it sets goals much loftier than merely increasing equality of access to the top rungs of hierarchies that still leave most people subjugated. Flores and Chaparro (2018) push us to consider that to be thorough advocates for our multilingual communities in the U.S. we need to expand our advocacy to the material and discursive struggles multilingual families face, such as in the cost of housing and ability to survive the current political moment. This advocacy would include fighting not just for DLBE program access, but rather for the livability and right to thrive in neighborhoods around these programs.

Authors

• James A. Gambrell, University of Northern Colorado

• Garrett Delavan, University of New Mexico