Ethnic Studies Teachers as Policymakers: Imagining Ethnic Studies for Multilingual Newcomer Immigrant Youth in California

• In Event: The Institutionalization of K-12 Ethnic Studies: Implementing Innovative Curricula across Diverse Social and Political Contexts

Abstract

In 2021, California became the first state in the United States to mandate a high school Ethnic Studies (ES) graduation requirement. As the implementation deadline approaches, scholars and educators must consider how this mandate will play out in diverse contexts, such as those serving multilingual recently-arrived immigrant youth (“newcomers”) (Finn, 2023). Most scholarship outlining the benefits of ES has focused on U.S.-born youth of color (Dee & Penner, 2017; Sleeter & Zavala, 2020) and has not examined the experiences of newcomer youth, even though their relationships with the U.S. racial order are distinct from those who have grown up here (Kim, 2008; Rodriguez & Macias, 2023; Zamora, 2022). This study explores “where the rubber meets the road” of the ES mandate by examining a collaborative of teachers serving multilingual newcomers in three schools in Northern California. We explore how these teachers make sense of and prepare to enact ES for their newcomer students.

We build on Menken & Garcia’s (2010) framework of teachers as policymakers, which argues that educators make language policy through their day to day practice in which they interpret, negotiate, and reimagine policy. We extend this framework to examine ES teachers of newcomers as language policymakers and ethnic studies policy implementers. Importantly, this study examines how teachers make sense of and implement policy through curricular and pedagogical choices informed by a critical ethnic studies framework that emphasizes criticality and community-responsiveness (Tintiangco-Cubales & Duncan Andrade, 2021).

This paper draws on ethnographic data from a weeklong collaborative with six teachers of multilingual newcomers during which they engaged in curriculum co-design. Our data sources include interview transcripts, fieldnotes and videorecordings of the collaborative meetings, and artifact analysis of materials developed within the collaborative.

Our findings demonstrate key dimensions of how teachers become policymakers long before teachers first interact with their students. First, we found that our participants collaboratively sought ways to bridge ES theories and frameworks with their practice to make ES relevant to their students. Second, the members of the collaborative grappled with the tensions and difficulties of teaching language acquisition and rigorous, critical content that reflects the purpose of ES. Finally, the collaborative facilitated a space for teachers to create new materials, texts, and resources that aimed to make ES relevant to their newcomer immigrant youth and their transnational knowledges.

The teachers in our study demonstrated a commitment to enacting critical, counter hegemonic ES curriculum and pedagogy that responded to the needs of their racialized multilingual newcomer students. The work of doing so, however, is challenging and requires more support, time, and resources than are often provided to teachers. Pushback against ES often flattens the deeply intellectual work that teachers do; our qualitative research demonstrates the thought, energy, and consideration that teachers are bringing to this work. Additionally, we argue that the negotiation of language education policy does not happen in a curricular vacuum. ES teachers of multilingual newcomers bring language education policy into a new light as they envision relevant ES praxis and pedagogy for their students.

Authors

• Rita Kamani-Renedo, Stanford University

• Eujin Park, Stanford University