Learning to Cross Divides: Examining Critical Multicultural and Bilingual Schools

• In Event: Social Justice

Proposal

Critical scholarship in education seeks to bear witness to the problematic inequities often found in schools, but also to closely observe and document the serious attempts to interrupt these inequalities (Apple, 2012). This research aims to do both, critiquing social and economic inequalities in a larger context and examining thoughtful and exemplary—though imperfect—schools designed to be culturally sustaining and empowering for all students, especially working-class students of color. The schools we focus on were intentionally founded to interrupt the reproduction of discrimination and inequity rampant in their respective contexts: a Spanish-English bilingual, multicultural, and anti-racist school in the US and an Arabic-Hebrew bilingual, multicultural school in Israel/Palestine educating for equality and a shared life. We carefully describe and analyze these schools' historical development and curricular strategies and pedagogies, as well as consider evidence of their successes and ongoing struggles and challenges.

We have acquired in-depth knowledge of these schools through 15 years of qualitative field research, using such methods as ethnographic participant observations (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011) and extensive semi-structured interviews (Seidman, 2019) with individuals deeply acquainted with and connected to these schools. We researched the US school first during the 2008-2009 school year and, again, during 2017-2021, documenting its curricula and pedagogy and the development and transformation of its bilingual, anti-racist social justice agenda over the years, as well as the political and practical challenges involved in achieving that agenda. Our research of the Israel/Palestine school was conducted between 2008-2019, in the framework of a wider study of several schools from the Jewish-Palestinian bilingual educational stream and was supplemented by recent follow-up interviews and discussions with current staff and administrators at the school. In total, we conducted over 60 interviews with a combination of current or former teachers, administrators, parents, and founders of the two schools. Interview participants were chosen to reflect the schools’ demographics and based on their perceived deep knowledge of the relevant school from many years of working at the school, studying at the school, and/or parenting a student at the school. Interviews lasted between one and two hours, depending on the level of detail offered by the interviewee. We also analyzed the research literature and publications and documents produced by the schools.

We view these innovative schools as operating at the forefront of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017). Accordingly, we analyze the political contexts in which the schools emerged and struggle to survive, as well as the political and practical obstacles they have faced and continue to contend with. While we use shared theoretical vocabulary, it is essential not only to discuss theoretical overlaps but also frictions and diversities in how these theories are applied, in light of the labor division in knowledge production (Takayama et al., 2017). Since one school is located in the West and the other is located in a semi-peripheral country, we also engage critically in the global (unequal) production and distribution of educational knowledge. For example, in Israel/Palestine, national and religious inequities are often central concerns; critical educators must thus think carefully about the contexts and social forces of inequality in a state that is characterized by some as an ethno-democratic state (e.g., Smooha, 2002) and by others as a settler-colonial state (e.g., Yiftachel, 2006), with all the contradictory implications that this entails. By carefully documenting and analyzing the multitudinal experiences of the educators, students, and parents participating in the educational work in these schools, we aim to reach more productive understandings of the tangled dilemmas involved in such culturally-sustaining, critical educational projects.

We would like to devote this presentation to three topics: (1) founding and maintaining such schools; (2) the schools’ achievements; and (3) struggles and challenges.
1. In both schools, we found that: a) founding this type of school is a challenging process that involves active participation of educators, activists. and community members, as well as eliciting the support of local and/or central educational authorities; (b) maintaining these schools is an on-going processes that includes the need to reevaluate, refine, and redesign the curricula and pedagogy; c) the school leadership and the composition of the student body and school community change and transform over time (especially after the founding generation moves on), which may require a revising of the school vision and agenda.
2. In both schools, educators succeeded in challenging local power structures by: a) diversifying their school’s students , community, and staff; b) adapting traditional pedagogy to make it more culturally relevant and attuned to students and their families; c) developing and designing interdisciplinary inquiry-based curricula and studies that are based on natural, cultural, and social that are based on natural, cultural, and social phenomena in the environment in which the school and is community are embedded.
3. However, our investigation also found that both schools struggled with significant challenges: a) the dominance of the majority language (English and Hebrew) caused on-going obstacles, especially in challenging existing power relations; b) the challenge of finding, supporting, and retaining qualified bilingual teachers; c) the challenge of differentiating instruction for a wide range of learners and persuading students that becoming bilingual is an admirable goal, worthy of taking social risks and making the required effort; d) the challenge of allocating time and resources to develop culturally relevant pedagogy.

We contend that much can be learned from carefully examining these two schools, not only as practical examples of worthy critically multicultural and bilingual education, but also how their shortcomings and limitations reflect the profound difficulty of overcoming the neoliberal, racial, social and ideological structures and forces that reproduce inequality in schools across the world.

Authors

• Assaf Meshulam, Ben Gurion University of The Negev

• Matthew Knoester, Ripon College