Countering Whitestream Bilingual Education With Teachers' Racial-Literacy Practices

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: A Critical Examination of Whiteness in Schools

Abstract

Drawing together critical race and literacy studies in education, the author theorizes a continuum of racial literacies, then employs it to examine anti-racist curriculum and instruction practices. She uses interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, the author argues that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges expose the need for structural attention and support for critical-racial-literacy practices. The author calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical racial consciousness.

Author

• Laura Carolina Chavez-Moreno, University of California - Los Angeles