Language Policy-making in new immigrant Head Starts

• In Event: Foregrounding the Local in Comparative Early Childhood public policy research

Proposal

This is a comparative ethnography that focuses on Head Start programs and their educators in four New Immigrant Settlement areas in Pennsylvania, and it investigates Head Start educators’ understanding and implementation of Head Start’s language policy of 2007. Under this policy, all educators are mandated to recognize multilingual children’s home languages as an asset and incorporate them into daily practices to support the development of both English and home language skills. Namely, educators are expected to conduct bilingual education.
Meanwhile, in those four areas, the existences of immigrants are relatively new, and most Head Start educators are monolingual English users. This study investigates how those educators confront the language policy of 2007, understand it, and turn it into their daily classroom practices, reflecting dialogical relationships they have had with surrounding facets, such as their language ideologies, backgrounds, training, organization, community, and children.
Combining anthropology of education policy and comparative ethnography as a method and theoretical framework, this study illustrates 1) The daily lives of educators and immigrant children in those dynamic communities, which cannot be captured by numbers or statistical data, 2) The bigger picture of how the well-intended policy is actually implemented in the classrooms, which leads to the investigation of what aspects should be changed to bring equitable language policy and education to multilingual children in Pennsylvania.
The findings indicate that the outcomes of the policy vary depending on several aspects: if the organization has people who share the cultural and linguistic background with children they mainly serve at the administrative level; if educators hold an asset-based perspective toward bilingualism; and how the new immigrant community has developed and merged into the original community. Although almost all the educators in those areas are eager to offer the “best” education for their students, what they consider the “best” is influenced by numerous factors. Often, it is contradicted by the policy’s intentions.
As the result of an ethnographic understanding of policy implementation, lives of Afro-Caribbean children attending Head Start in Pennsylvania, and monolingual English-speaking educators’ struggles serving children who speak Spanish, it is confirmed that policy needs to be flexible enough to be modified by educators. Still, at the same time, the core intentions of it need to be communicated clearly to the educators who hold the potentials to make their policies, for that, training, resources for teachers and communications between Head Start programs and public schools are crucial.

Author

• Kiyomi Umezawa, The University of Hawaii at Manoa