Education as Citizen Formation: Language Politics in California and Mexico

• In Event: State and Diaspora Policies on Ethnicity and Political Engagement

Abstract

Intercultural competency –meaning behaviors, attitudes, and policies that enable systems and people to work effectively in cross-cultural situations— informs the quality of social and political life and civic participation in multicultural states like Mexico and the United States. In culturally diverse regions such as Oaxaca, Mexico, and northern California, the public school classroom is a primary space of state-citizen interface where students are exposed to norms and values that form engaged citizenship. Yet little has been documented about the relationship between education policy as it pertains to language access, intercultural competency formation, and civic, cultural, and political participation among youth, particularly for minority youth.
This multi-methods-based project explores the effects of Indigenous and Spanish heritage language learning in high school on youth ages fourteen to twenty-five for whom Yurok, Zapotec, and Spanish are heritage languages. The data is derived from political ethnography and qualitative interviews, as well as focus groups and surveys. Significantly, the project is rooted in a collaborative methodological framework that actively engages community members as stakeholders at each phase of the research process, including question and instrument design as well as analysis. Capturing both depth and breadth across five schools in two countries, the paper documents ways that access to language learning serves as a component of intercultural competency development for secondary school students and translates into different forms of participation.

Author

• Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College