“Nothing belongs to us”: The Spatial Precarity of Heritage Language Education in Mainstream Public Schools.

• In Event: From Margins to Models: Sustaining Heritage & Dual Language Education in Less Commonly Taught Languages

Abstract

Objectives
Heritage language education for racialized communities in the U.S. often takes place in borrowed, temporary spaces—frequently in public schools after hours—exposing these programs to forms of spatial and institutional precarity. This paper argues that such spatial precarity reflects broader systems of racializing surveillance, marginalization, and exclusion in public education. Using a case study of a U.S.-based Arabic Saturday school, the paper illustrates how space becomes a site of contested belonging and control, shaping language learning experiences and opportunities.

Theoretical Framework
The paper draws on critical scholarship at the intersection of surveillance and race (Browne, 2012; Selod, 2018) as well as conceptualizations of space as socially constructed and infused with politics that reflect and reproduce inequities (Lefebvre, 1974; Massey 2005 and 2017) to interrogate not only the local tensions within one Arabic Saturday school but also the structural positioning of heritage language programs as marginal in the U.S. educational landscape.

Methods
The paper draws on two interrelated sources of data: (1) a facility use contract between an Arabic community language school and the school district, and (2) field notes, interviews, and artifacts collected over two years of ethnographic research. Employing a critical discourse analysis approach (Wodak & Meyer, 2016), I explored how the discursive strategies in the facility use contract constructed actors at the public and community school.

Results
The textual analysis of the facility use contract revealed how seemingly neutral policies deploy topoi of danger to construct community school teachers and students as threats to be surveilled and topoi of authority to position public-school actors as neutral stewards of space, granting the latter authority to use subjective and racialized judgments—such as how a principal “feels”—as grounds for terminating the contract and denying the community language school access to the facility. The ethnographic data grounded this textual analysis in lived experience, revealing dynamics that regulated the micro-level spatial practices of the heritage school’s teachers and students, such as where they could sit and what they could use in the space. While grounded in one Arabic Saturday school, these findings highlight how regimes of spatial policing function as material enactments of racializing surveillance processes that construct the heritage schoolteachers and students as transgressive and hamper the language learning opportunities afforded at community language schools. These processes, I argue, are not unique to this case but reflect a broader logic of exclusion and marginalization of heritage language education across the U.S.

Scholarly Significance
The paper contributes to recent scholarship that has documented the logistical challenges faced by community language schools due to their lack of permanent space, reframing these challenges not as circumstantial challenges but as manifestations of racializing surveillance that is systemically structured and spatially enacted and exploring how it affects the teaching and learning of language in education spaces. The case of the Arabic Saturday school illustrates the spatial precarity of heritage language education in mainstream public schools and underscores the urgency of reimagining the future of public educational space as one that recognizes community language schools as integral educational institutions within the broader ecology of the U.S. educational system.

Author

• Rima Elabdali, University of Tennessee