The Contact Zone: A Postcolonial Analysis of Immigrant Students' Linguistic Experiences in the Preschool Years

• In Event: 14.044 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.044-3 - Highlighting Immigrant Capacity, Voice, and Resistance in Learning Contexts

Abstract

This paper seeks to add to the literature about achieving educational equity for bilingual immigrant students. Grounded in postcolonial theory, this project frames schooling as a mechanism of colonial power that perpetuates historical and current instances of colonization. As the first contact between home and school, language use within a preschool classroom is analyzed in order to understand how home languages and English are mechanized to perpetuate imperial English-only ideologies. Preliminary data analysis demonstrates how the education of bilingual immigrant students is embedded within larger ideologies of citizenship and white supremacy. This project provides an alternative view to the dominant discourse of dual language education to allow for a more complete analysis on the different power relations operating within schools.

Author

• Amanda Irwin Miller, Tufts University