Reimagining Possibilities for Sibling Relationships in Bilingual Education During a Time of Loss and Uncertainty

• In Event: Resetting From the Margins: Humanizing Educational Experiences With Racially and Linguistically Minoritized Students and Communities

Abstract

Within a U.S. settler-colonial and racist-capitalist state, schools serve as spaces where knowledge forms and ways of being are often imposed upon their members. Families are expected to follow norms, practices, and interactions in schools that uphold hegemonic whiteness (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013). Ladson-Billings (2021) suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to refuse the permanence of hegemony and oppression, and reimagine learning and being in schools. As such, this presentation examines how racially minoritized siblings in a bilingual program during the COVID-19 pandemic contest dominant conceptualizations of family-school relations. It showcases how siblings’ interactions present alternate possibilities for what relationships among family members can be in schools.

This paper is informed by Sojoyner’s (2017) public education as enclosed space and Patel’s (2019) fugitive learning as anticolonial practice. Sojoyner (2017) refers to schools as enclosed spaces that reproduce multiple forms of violence for minoritized children and uphold oppressive forms of governance found in broader society. Patel (2019) highlights how minoritized groups in enclosed spaces like schools have taken up learning as fugitive practice, “an enactment of life, as cognizant and tactically resistant to the colonizing bondage of body and mind” (p. 258). She suggests that knowledge production as fugitive practice often occurs in public spaces that are not considered by the projects of colonization and indoctrination.

This presentation draws from a two-year ethnographic study of a dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program, in the Greater Boston Area. Focal informants included three sibling pairs, four teachers, and two school administrators. Data generation consisted of semi-structured interviews, artifacts, and observations. Data analysis was informed by Luttrell’s (2010) three-step analytical process. The first and second readings consisted of looking for recurring “images, words, phrases followed by coherence among the stories” that arose from siblings’ experiences (Luttrell, 2010, p. 262). The third reading considered patterns across the data and engaged in coding derived from the conceptual framework.

Findings reveal how siblings acted as co-designers of their learning and healing during the COVID-19 pandemic by strategically repurposing school spaces and policies. For example, one sibling group arranged specific times during the school day to meet outside the school bathrooms and inquire about their learning and overall health. With regard to another sibling group, a Latinx third-grader stopped by his sister’s first grade classroom during a water break. He asked the first grade teacher if he could physically step into the classroom and ask his sister how she was feeling and what activity she was currently engaged in. In turn, this third grader’s hesitation to step into the first grade classroom revealed his recognition of a spatial power asymmetry among children and adults.

Accordingly, this presentation attends to the 2022 conference theme by showcasing how siblings’ schooling experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the importance of using this historical moment to rethink the purpose and structure of education. These children remind us that another life is possible. Specifically, they show us that humanizing representations and types of relations between families and schools can take place.

Author

• Jasmine Alvarado, Boston College