Learning to "Echar Ganas en la Escuela" (Try Hard in School)

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: “American Dream Is a Lie”: New Scholarship on the Cultural (Re)production of “Success” and “Failure”

Abstract

Objective: Language education scholars have illuminated the negative consequences that NCLB and high-stakes standardized testing policies have had on the instruction that emergent bilingual students receive (Abedi, 2004; Menken, 2006; 2008; Shohamy, 2003; 2007; Wright, 2005). Yet further research is needed to better understand how standardized assessments, as well as other forms of assessment, impact emergent bilinguals’ learning as it unfolds inside and outside of school (Menken, 2008; Shohamy, 2001; Shohamy, 2005). Seeking to fill this gap, this study examines how assessment policies, at the federal, state, elementary school, and classroom levels, shape the ways in which teachers, immigrant parents, and peer students use language to direct and evaluate emergent bilingual children during routine academic activities and to position emergent bilinguals’ social and academic identities across home and school settings.

Conceptual Framework: By adopting a language socialization approach (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986), this study highlights the link between assessments and the ways that teachers, parents, and students use language to direct, evaluate, and position one another during everyday activities. Ochs (1993) defines social identities as “a range of social personae, including social statuses, social roles, positions, relationships, and institutional and other relevant community identities one may attempt to claim or assign in the course of social life” (p. 288). Grounded in theories of language socialization research, this study recognizes the interconnectedness between language use, social identities, and community-wide ideologies about language, gender, race, and parenting.

Modes of Inquiry and Data: Data were collected as part of a two-year ethnographic study of literacy learning in a New Latino Diaspora context. The focal participants in the study included six children of Mexican origin who recently completed second grade at the same elementary school. Data was collected through participant observation on 10-15 household visits to each family’s home and 26 visits to the second-grade bilingual classroom. The data included field notes, artifacts such as assessments and report cards, interviews, and audio-recorded interactions during routine literacy events including homework completion and classroom lessons.

Conclusions and Significance: The findings illustrate the ways in which the second-grade bilingual teacher attempted to remediate ‘low’ learner status by producing narratives during classroom routines and report card comments about the need for students to “put in more effort.” Seeking to align with teachers’ expectations for effort, Spanish-speaking parents and emergent bilingual children sought to quickly obtain answers from peers or siblings for English assignments that they did not understand. The analysis demonstrates how these school-based narratives about effort indexed neoliberal ideologies which attribute success or failure to individuals and overlook how assessment policies and English-privilege marginalized students and parents from the activities in which their effort was evaluated. In light of these findings, this research calls upon educators and education policymakers to shift policies and discourses of reform away from strategies aimed at increasing parent and student ‘effort’ and towards methods of transferring power to immigrant families.

Author

• Meredith McConnochie, University of Saint Joseph