Experiments in Americanization: The Racialization of Students as Having Distinct Linguistic and Health Needs

• In Event: Interrogating the Racialization of the Language of Science and the Science of Language

Abstract

Science teachers today receive a steady stream of messages about how to adapt instruction to meet the ‘needs’ ascribed to students classified as culturally and linguistically diverse. Journals like The Science Teacher feature lesson plans for engaging “ELLs” (English language learners) with instruction tied to real-life decision making, such as “food choices” (Danielowich, 2014; Medina-Jerez & Campbell, 2015). These recommendations aim to counteract a history of standardized science teaching narrowly focused on vocabulary by expanding instruction to address personal and community health. That view of history, however, reflects an amnesia about segregated ‘Mexican schools’ in the United States, where English-language instruction on daily health and dietary habits was a central strategy of Americanization.

Drawing together insights from the historiography of Chicano education (González, 2013; Torres-Rouff, 2012) and postcolonial science studies (Anderson, 2006), this study explores how educational research began racializing Mexican American pupils as having distinct linguistic and health needs. Using a historicizing methodology (Foucault, 1991), we examine a wide range of archival sources (1916–1946), including federal reports, educational research theses, and curricular materials pertaining to Americanization programs (e.g., Bogardus, 1919) and segregated schools for Mexican Americans (e.g., Hayden 1934). We juxtapose these sources with a re-examination of early 20th-century science education scholarship, where anxieties about the ‘foreign-born’ and their ‘foreign tongues’ provoked educators to borrow techniques from euthenics and hygiene campaigns to promote physical and mental Americanization (e.g., Grier, 1920; Howes, 1934).

Our analysis examines how segregated schools for Mexican American children became envisioned as laboratories for Americanization experiments. Hygiene demonstrations, health charts, and home cooking projects were calibrated not only to teach English, but to clean the ‘Spanish vernacular’ and ‘foreign atmosphere’ from the child’s mind (e.g., Rodee, 1923). Through studies drawn from ethnology, endocrinology, dietary science, and sociology, a ‘foreign tongue’ became projected as a pedagogically salient marker of superstitious thought, undeveloped character, malnourished bodies, and unhygienic homes—effectively racializing these students as distant from the 'language of science.' Meanwhile, science education journals recommended the use of home surveys to inspect sanitary conditions and identify distinct ‘racial needs’ (e.g., Hunter, 1924; Davis, 1938), and advised the use of hygiene projects and science plays with ‘foreign-born students’ to encourage healthier, English-only living (e.g., Poole & Doherty, 1940).

Our study contributes to a growing body of science education research concerned with rethinking language in relation to racialization and power (e.g., Lemmi et al., 2019; Suárez, 2020). This mirrors a prior shift in linguistic anthropology from efforts to demonstrate that ‘all languages are equal’ to directing scrutiny at ‘racializing discourses’ themselves (Hill, 1998). Our work contributes to these efforts by uncovering the role that science- and health-related pedagogies have played in the production of race and language as objects of scientific inquiry and intervention. At issue is how the fabrication of raciolinguistic distinctions (Rosa & Flores, 2017) impacted not only the segregated margins, but also the normative center (Morrison, 1992)—helping to constitute what came to be called ‘mainstream’ American science education.

Authors

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Cynthia Baeza, University of Wisconsin - Madison