"I'll Be the Hero": How Adolescents Negotiate Intersectional Identities Within a High School Dual-Language Program

• In Event: Identity and Two-Way Bilingual Education: Considering Student Perspectives

Abstract

Adolescents within dual-language classrooms simultaneously explore new language and content as they negotiate sociolinguistic, gendered, racialized, and institutionalized norms governing the multiple and intersectional (Hancock, 2016) identities available to them in these spaces. While dual-language settings can help adolescents build relationships with ethnolinguistically different peers who might otherwise be tracked into separate classrooms (Authors, 2015), these spaces, nested within a larger racialized U.S. system, can also reify marginalized identities (Palmer, 2008; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016). As part of efforts to connect and collaborate in educational problem-solving, we examine how adolescents in a dual-language program negotiate intersectional identities through interaction, while engaged in small-group exploratory talk around the task of a collaborative-writing project.

The idea of exploratory talk (Barnes, 2008) takes root in constructivist ideas, through which students build their learning while working to understand new ideas. We also draw from Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) framework of five principles for identity analysis in interactions, based on a definition of identity as “the social positioning of self and other” (p. 586).

This study took place in Languages Across Borders (LAB), an extra-curricular Spanish-English dual-language program at a Virginia public high school. All sessions were audio-recorded. Primary data for this analysis are transcripts of recordings. Contextualizing this data are detailed observational field-notes and student-produced documents. Using a microethnographic discourse analytic lens (Bloome et al., 2005; Erickson, 2004), we examined how four students in an extra-curricular high school dual-language Spanish-English program negotiate intersectional identities while engaging in small-group work to write a bilingual book to share with elementary students. We analyzed these moments according to Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) five principles.

Through our microethnographic lens, we closely examined how two adolescents (Emily and Javier) negotiated intersecting identities while they collaboratively wrote a bilingual book. Interactional patterns reveal how students used exploratory talk to simultaneously negotiate a host of macro and local identities, some of which were language-related and some of which went beyond those that are language-based. We also demonstrate how Javier, a linguistically minoritized student, in some contexts negotiated agentive and powerful intersectional identities but, in others, faced minoritized identities that highlighted who he was not (i.e., through a deficit lens), rather than who he was (i.e., through an asset-oriented and holistic lens).

Our work complexifies how minoritized adolescents negotiate intersectional identities during interactions within dual-language spaces. We believe examining how adolescents take up academic work and exploratory talk in bilingual peer groups can help researchers and teachers recognize the range of ways adolescents enact academic identities in dual-language settings, as well as the interactional patterns that create spaces for agency and lead to negation. Our work also suggests the value of engaging students in critically examining identities that might be placed on them as participants in dual-language programs and involving them in the social-equity work that many dual-language participants ideologically espouse.

Authors

• Amanda Kibler, Oregon State University

• April Simun Salerno, University of Virginia

• Christine Hardigree, Iona College