Challenging the Gentrification of Two-Way Bilingual Education: Critical Ethnography as Curricular Intervention

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Ethnographic Approaches at the Intersections of Curriculum, Ideology, Language, and Race(ism) in Bilingual Spaces

Abstract

Because even though I don’t go on the tours (for interested parents) and I try not to dip my toe in that, I’m there during planning time when people are checking in and I see the people who are coming in. And they’re not the people I have in my classroom. So I think it’s like a free McMillan (elite dual language private school in the city). (Interview, 2/24/16)

We begin with these words from a teacher as an entry point into the current sociopolitical context of Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) marked by rapid growth and gentrification processes and the “generative theme” (Freire, 1997) that ignited our curricular collaboration around this same sociopolitical context. Author 2’s perspectives of the (white) “people” gentrifying Plainview Elementary were “not the people” for whom bilingual education was designed to serve, which has been described as the gentrification of DLBE (Chaparro, 2020; Author 1 2019a; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016) amidst explosive growth of DLBE programs in the US. In this paper, we document how critical ethnography maps wider social relationships and human experience from the local to the global (Means, 2013) and critically listens to and advocates for the those being oppressed by processes such as gentrification (Madison, 2011); specifically through the emergence, conceptualization, and enactment of a curricular intervention around gentrification processes impacting Latinx students in “[her] classroom,” while also providing yet another “cautionary note” (Valdés, 1997) about the dangerous potential of the neoliberal exploitation of Latinx students by those “people” who thirst for bilingualism (Cervantes-Soon, 2018; Morales & Maravilla, 2019). We believe it is urgent to examine how neoliberal processes in bilingual education that prioritize logics of the market, individualism, and the accumulation of human capital (Cervantes-Soon, 2014) take root “on the ground” (Means, 2013) in DLBE contexts and most importantly challenge these processes by centering the lives and realities of Latinx students and families through humanizing pedagogies that foment critical consciousness for all stakeholders (Author 1, 2019b). Our “local” intervention positioned gentrification as a “generative theme,” a continuously and dialectically unfolding unresolved social problem that provides opportunities for students to engage in dialogue and struggle (Freire, 1997). This local intervention in the form of a unit around gentrification talked back to “global” processes being shaped by the recent “discovery’ (Flores, 2015), “whitening” (Flores & García, 2017), and “rebranding” (Katnelson & Bernstein, 2016) of DLBE at a time when “tour[ists]” are “checking [out]” how DLBE programs can augment one’s human capital (De Lissovoy, 2015).

Authors

• Dan Heiman, University of Texas at El Paso

• Michelle Yanes, University of Toronto