Challenging Race-Erased Perspectives of Language in Whitestream Bilingual Education: Toward a Race-Radical Vision

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-9 - Revitalizing Race-Radicalism in Bilingual Education

Abstract

This paper presents a Race Radical Vision (RRV) for bilingual education that rejects antiracist liberal multilingualism and supports race racialization as a new vision of scholarship. It is argued in this paper that much of scholarship on and practices within contemporary bilingual education policies and programs represent Whitestream (Urrieta, 2009) language hegemony and practices that essentially erase race and race radicalism from the discourse on bilingual education for emergent bilingual users. Whitestream bilingual education promotes a type of bilingualism to represent “academic language” practices and destroy local language practices in bilingual communities.

A Race Radical Vision for bilingual education has two purposes: (1) To expose liberal multilingualism and colonial language practices in bilingual and dual language programs, and (2) To offer a counter-narrative for recasting language as belonging to bilingual communities and informed by activist struggles to decolonize schooling within local situated contexts.

Erasing Race and Racism in Language. This paper argues that under liberal multilingualism, language, as a proxy for race, has become color-blind and positioned as an autonomous, individual object. The liberal multilingual narrative used for bilingual education is that learning (standard) Spanish as a bridge to learning (standard) English has enabled Spanish-speakers to participate more fully in Whitestream power relations. Students in bilingual and dual language programs are currently expected to learn to use the two languages autonomously in ways that represent Whitestream positions about what counts as language in academic contexts. This paper examines in more detail the development of academic language (Faltis, 2013) and segregated language practices (García, Flores, & Woodley, 2012) as the model for liberal multicultural versions of bilingual education in the 21st century.

Activist Language Practices in Bilingual Education. The final section of the paper offers an alternative narrative for language practices in bilingual education. This counter-narrative draws on activist struggles for bilingual education promoted in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, and more recently by Chicana/o activists who draw on Chicana feminist scholarship, as acts of resistance to Whitesteam liberal multilingual practices. Activist language practices seek to promote “subjectivities capable of transformation and relocation, movement guided by the learned capacity to read, renovate, and make signs on behalf of the dispossessed” (Sandoval, 1998, p. 359). Among the acts of resistance and transformative practices examined for use in bilingual education from an RRV perspective are Urrieta’s (2009) autochthonous framework; community art-based approaches; and translanguaging pedagogies.

Faltis, C. (2013). Demystifying and questioning the power of academic language. In M.B. Arias & C. Faltis (Eds.), Academic language in second language learning, (pp. 3-26). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Press.

García, O., Flores, N. & Woodley, H.H. (2012). Transgressing monolingualism and bilingual dualities: Translanguaging pedagogies. In A. Uiakoumetti (Ed.), Harnessing Linguistic Variation for Better Education (pp. 45-75). Bern: Peter Lang.

Sandoval, C. (1998). Mestizaje as method: Feminists of color challenge the canon. In C. Trujillo (Ed.), Living Chicana theory, (pp. 352-370). Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press.

Urrieta, L. (2009). Working from within: Chicana and Chicano activist educators in whitestream schools. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Author

• Christian J. Faltis, University of California - Davis