Adult ESOL Learning as a Racialized Context of Reception

• In Event: Adult Literacy, Equity, and Social Justice

Abstract

This qualitative study is broadly situated in the Contexts of Reception (COR) literature but extends COR into the area of adult education and considers how the processes of racialization function as significant contextual factors influencing incorporation for immigrants of color and in this case, predominantly Black immigrants. The study examined how participants in an ESOL program engaged in teaching/learning about the racial structures and discourses of the host society and sought to understand how immigrant adults make sense of integrating into a racially and linguistically unjust society. Findings suggest that the adult ESOL learning context reproduced ideologies of whiteness, but that adult students nonetheless engaged in important sensemaking and contestation of the host society’s racial structures and discourses.

Author

• Lauren Plitkins, University of Washington