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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The Chinese plaintiffs named in Lau v. Nichols (1974) are seldom discussed within bilingual education nor language policy research due in part to their smaller size compared to larger linguistic communities. Further, Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are often ascribed as passive and politically malleable (Masuoka, 2006; Yeung, 2024). Such homogenous ascriptions of complacency are laden with raciolinguistic constructions of nationhood and belonging contributing to the erasure of AAPI histories in language education. This symposium addresses this oversight, describing how multilingual education has been developed and experienced by AAPI communities, centering AAPI agency in language policy transformation (Mistry & Kiyama, 2021), addressing the theme of remedy and repair within multilingual education.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Bilingual Education Research

Chair

• Trish Morita-Mullaney, Purdue University

Papers

• Bilingual-Bicultural Education Rejected: English-Only Despite Lau - John Chi, University of Maryland; Sarah C.K. Moore, University of Maryland

• The Chinese Freedom Schools: The Conflicted History between Lau and Brown - Trish Morita-Mullaney, Purdue University

• Lau v. Nichols Revisited: Addressing Equity in Dual Language Programs for Asian Students in California - Jongyeon Joy Ee, Loyola Marymount University; Kenzo K. Sung, Loyola Marymount University

• Community-based and formal Chinese language education in urban California, 50 years after Lau v. Nichols - David Shuang Song, University of Oklahoma

• Principal Agency Fifty Years After the Lau Decision: Building and Sustaining Bilingual Education Programs for Asian Languages - Zhongfeng Tian, Rutgers University - Newark; Kevin M. Wong, Pepperdine University

Discussant

• Christine Montecillo Leider, University of Massachusetts - Lowell