Community-based and formal Chinese language education in urban California, 50 years after Lau v. Nichols

• In Event: Reconciling Erasure Within Lau: Asian and Asian American Reparations in Multilingual Education

Abstract

Objectives
This research study tracks the state of Mandarin language education for Chinese-diasporic communities, 50 years after Lau v. Nichols.

Theoretical Framework
This research article applies a Bourdieusian-multilingual framework, drawing dually from the insights of two bodies of theory. The former broadly consists of the multilingual turn, raciolinguistics, and the educational-linguistic concept of heritage language, which are able to recognize Chinese-American diasporic multilingualism as transcending dominant conceptualizations of race and language (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Carreira & Kagan, 2017; Flores & Rosa 2015; He, 2006; Song et al., 2014; Valdés, 2019; Wiley & García, 2016). The latter body attends to classification struggle, i.e., struggle over symbolic resources and define symbolic practices as resources, especially in relation to institutions of power such as the formal education system (Bourdieu, 1987; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), as well as to interest convergence (Bell, 1980).

Methods
I spent about three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of educational settings that serve Chinese-diasporic youth. I conducted about 110 interviews across participants, with many repeated interviews with focal students and Mandarin teachers. The four educational settings in the San Francisco Bay Area are: A community weekend school in San Francisco’s Chinatown (CC); a private afterschool language education program in an affluent suburb of Silicon Valley (SVC); a public high school, near SVC (SVH); and a public high school, ethnically diverse and largely working-class (FH).

Findings
CC is characterized by a theme of linguistic pride to profit (Duchêne & Heller, 2012), with school leaders transitioning from the Cantonese home language of most students to Mandarin. SVC is characterized by a theme of elite bilingualism as concerted cultivation (see Lareau, 2005), with the aim of making Mandarin available to all families of its affluent clientele, de-emphasizing students’ ethnic background and home use of Mandarin. SVH is characterized by a theme of cultural capital exchange, where students strive to complete AP Mandarin as quickly as possible in order to accumulate high educational prestige; the arrangement benefits students who use Mandarin at home and have used and learned Mandarin afterschool programs such as SVH. FH is characterized by a theme of “multiracial Mandarin,” where teachers seek to include students who do not use Mandarin or other Chinese languages at home, specifically Black and Latinx students. This practice involves the conscious marginalization of diasporic multilingualism.

Scholarly Significance
This study argues that pedagogical possibilities for serving multilingual students in these communities remain restricted for Chinese-diasporic youth 50 years after Lau, though the causes of this restriction are complex, engaging both the lack of a governmentally dominant language policy that accommodates multilingualism, status competition in schools, and discourses of educational equity that tend to position Asian American youth as academic achievers.

Author

• David Shuang Song, University of Oklahoma