Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism

Beyond Heritage Languages in a Global City

Ofelia García, Zeena Zakharia, Bahar Otcu, Ofelia García, Zeena Zakharia, Bahar Otcu

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847698025
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores bilingual community education, specifically the educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children in the multilingual city of New York. Employing a rich variety of case studies which highlight the importance of the ethnolinguistic community in bilingual education, this collection examines the various structures that these communities use to educate their children as bilingual Americans. In doing so, it highlights the efforts and activism of these communities and what bilingual community education really means in today's globalized world. The volume offers new understandings of heritage language education, bilingual education, and speech communities for bilingual Americans in the 21st century.

Part 1

Conceptualizing Bilingual Community Education

1 Bilingual Community Education: Beyond Heritage Language Education and Bilingual Education in New York

Ofelia García, Zeena Zakharia and Bahar Otcu

Introduction

This book focuses on educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children, what we are calling here bilingual community education. Some of these activities include what others might call supplementary or complementary schools – after-school and weekend programs. Others are informal educational spaces. Yet others are private day schools or public school ventures where the community has been the leading force.

We use New York, a global multilingual city, as a case study to explore the structures and meanings of bilingual community education, as well as to better understand American ethnolinguistic communities and their networks in today’s globalized world. In doing so, we extend present understandings of ‘heritage language education’ and ‘bilingual education’. We also reconceptualize the notion of an ‘ethnolinguistic speech community’ for a global world.

In this chapter, we trace the development of educational spaces for US ethnolinguistic communities, as we point to the small amount of attention that these community-driven efforts have received in the scholarly literature until very recently. We discuss the differences in naming these activities ethnic mother-tongue schools, supplementary/complementary schools, heritage language education programs or bilingual education programs. In choosing to name these activities bilingual community education, we indicate that the focus of these activities is bilingual in nature, and not just the maintenance of an ‘ethnic-mother tongue’ or the development of a ‘heritage language’. In indicating the community aspect of these activities, we distance ourselves from bilingual education programs in which the educational agents are other than those within the particular bilingual community, and where the governmental focus is the development of the dominant national language, namely English in the US case.

We divide this foundational chapter into three parts. Section I, Traditions and Context, reviews the tradition and continuities of bilingual community education in the US, and then turns to describing the sociolinguistic situation of New York City to ensure that readers understand how the dynamism and contacts in a global city shape all these efforts.

Sections II and III engage examples from this book to conceptualize two major theoretical contributions that we wish to make to the field of language education:

• First, these bilingual community education spaces, because of both their sociolinguistic and their socioeducational characteristics, go beyond what has been called ‘heritage language education’, as well as the timid efforts of public US ‘bilingual education’ (Section II: Beyond heritage language and bilingual education).

• Second, our cases lead to new understandings of US ethnolinguistic communities, beyond those of ‘speech communities’ of traditional sociolinguistics towards diasporic communities (Section III: Beyond ethnolinguistic communities).

Our chapter closes with a Conclusion that describes some of the challenges that these schools face, and offers recommendations for future directions.

The first part of Section I describes the long tradition of bilingual community education in the US. We pay attention to the role that it has played in different periods of US history. As we do so, we explore the scarce scholarship that has surrounded the existence of these bilingual community education efforts. We also try to disentangle the disparate visions that each name for these activities has conjured.

I: Traditions and Context

Traditions and continuities

The attention paid to the education of American children in public schools has diverted interest from efforts by different US communities to educate their children in ways that reflect their various characteristics, languages, cultures and values. Yet there has been a long US tradition of bilingual community schooling.

Early German language communities established their own bilingual schools with community funds, sometimes aided by public funds. It is well known, for example, that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries there was a sizable network of parochial German-language schools of the Lutheran and the Reformed churches in Pennsylvania and Ohio (Castellanos, 1983; Crawford, 2004; García, 2009a). Although Germans had the largest network of schools that used languages other than English (LOTEs hereafter) in the 19th century, there were other ethnolinguistic groups who also organized their own schools. The Cherokees, for example, established and operated their own educational system in the 1850s, in which their children were taught to read and write Cherokee (García, 2009a).

This tolerance towards the establishment of educational programs by ethnolinguistic communities nearly came to a halt in the xenophobic atmosphere surrounding the early 20th century. Between 1890 and 1930, 16 million immigrants entered the US, increasingly from Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as the Greater Syria region of the Ottoman Empire. Gradually, the great number of Germans in the US, coupled with their enemy status during World War I, fueled suspicion against all ethnolinguistic groups (Crawford, 1992; García, 2009a; Kloss, 1977). The mood of the time was captured by Theodore Roosevelt when he said in 1915: ‘There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language’ (as cited in Edwards, 1994: 166).

By 1923, 34 of the 48 US states required that English be the sole language of instruction (García, 2009a). In that same year, in Meyer vs Nebraska, the US Supreme Court asserted that Meyer, a parochial school teacher in Nebraska, had not violated the state’s 1919 statute that mandated English-only instruction when he taught a Bible story to a 10-year-old child in German (Del Valle, S., 2003). This more tolerant attitude, coupled with the increasing support for ‘cultural pluralism’, espoused by John Dewey and Horace Kallen, led to additional efforts by some US ethnolinguistic communities to establish educational programs for their own children. Around this time, the Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Greek, Yiddish and French-speaking communities developed a network of after-school and weekend programs in which their languages and cultures, and in some cases their religions, were taught.

In the 1960s, the ethnic revival that accompanied the era of Civil Rights led to the further development of bilingual education programs, often supported by ethnolinguistic communities, especially Latinos. With funding from the Ford Foundation, a bilingual two-way program was established in the Coral Way Elementary School in Miami-Dade County. The goal of the program was to develop English language proficiency and maintain the Spanish of recently arrived Cuban children, as well as to develop the Spanish language proficiency and the English of Anglo children. This program led the way for the renaissance of bilingual education in the US in the second half of the 20th century. Bilingual programs to teach English, as well as to maintain the Spanish language, were developed by Latino communities in Texas, New Mexico, California and Arizona (García, 2009a). As Castellanos (1983) reminds us, this growth of bilingual education programs in the 20th century started without any federal involvement.

In 1968, the US Congress passed Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – the Bilingual Education Act. The Act authorized Congress to put aside money for school districts that had large language minority enrollments and that wanted to start bilingual education programs or create bilingual instructional material.

The ethnic revival of the 1960s (Fishman, 1985a) also fueled scholarly interest in sociolinguistics, bilingualism and ethnic studies. It was at this time that Joshua A. Fishman conducted his Language Loyalty in the United States study (Fishman, 1966). ‘Ethnic-group schools’, or as he later called them, ‘ethnic mother-tongue schools’, were included in Fishman’s study as important community institutions that sustained the life of ethnolinguistic groups in the US (Fishman & Nahirny, 1966). These ethnic-group schools were networks of all-day and supplementary schools organized, maintained and funded (fully or in part) by the ethnolinguistic communities themselves. Fishman noted then three types of such schools that accounted for almost 1885 units:

(1) Day schools that provide instruction in the linguistic, cultural and religious heritages of ethnic groups.

(2) Weekday afternoon schools, or supplementary schools that are in session two or more weekday afternoons throughout the school year.

(3) Weekend schools that normally meet on Saturdays or Sundays.

Fishman noted that these efforts by ethnolinguistic communities to educate their children under community auspices and in languages other than English were significant for language maintenance purposes. He claimed then:

Language maintenance in the United States is desirable, in that the non-English language resources of American minority groups have already helped meet our urgent national need for speakers of various non-English languages, and that these resources can be reinforced and developed so as to do so to a very much greater extent in the future. (Fishman, 1966: 370–371)

The activities of these ethnic mother-tongue schools identified by Fishman contrasted sharply with what publicly funded bilingual education programs came to be. In 1974, when the Bilingual Education Act was re-authorized, bilingual education was redefined as:

[I]nstruction given in, and study of, English and (to the extent necessary to allow a child to progress effectively through the education system) the native language of the children of limited English speaking ability. (As cited in Castellanos, 1983: 120)

Whereas the ethnic mother-tongue schools in the Fishman study, the two-way bilingual education program of Coral Way, and the developmental maintenance bilingual education programs in the American Southwest and elsewhere had as their goal the bilingualism and biliteracy of children, this new definition of public bilingual education restricted it to a transitional goal. That is, the focus of public bilingual education became the development of the academic English (and not the maintenance or development of the language other than English) of those ethnolinguistic minorities who had ‘limited proficiency’ in English, and often were recent immigrants. Although some bilingual education programs continued to support the development of children’s home languages, the federal goal in supporting bilingual education became the improvement of English for immigrants, and not the education of American ethnolinguistic communities in ways that supported their bilingualism and biliteracy.

In the 1980s, Joshua A. Fishman revisited the study of community resources of languages other than English in the US. He again included among these resources the educational institutions that he now called ‘ethnic mother-tongue schools’ (Fishman, 1980a, 1980b). In the two decades that separated the first study from the second, the number of these ethnic mother-tongue schools had grown from 1885 to 6553. Yet, pointing to the fact that two-thirds of these institutions operated only on afternoons or weekends, Fishman et al. (1985: 38) concluded: ‘[E]thnolinguistic education is supplementary, and therefore it is quite probably too meager to constitute a serious contribution to language maintenance’. Fishman argued then for high-quality bilingual all-day schools, whether community-funded or supported through public funds, oriented toward the task of language maintenance. He said:

We have been guilty of horrible neglect with respect to our language resources. Language maintenance bilingual education can be one long-overdue step in the direction of reversing this shameful and wasteful policy. (Fishman, 1980c: 170)

By the time that Joshua A. Fishman completed his 1980 study of the community resources of ethnic languages in the US, a new movement was afoot. Spearheaded by Senator Samuel Hayakawa, the Official English movement and US English posed new restrictions on the use of languages other than English, especially in bilingual education. Although efforts to introduce constitutional amendments at the federal level to make English the official language of the US were later abandoned, the movement continued at the state level (Crawford, 2004; García, 2009a; García & Kleifgen, 2010). At the time of this writing, 31 US states have English-only laws.

This more restrictive language ideology and policy has had negative effects on public bilingual education, especially in California, Arizona and Massachusetts, where bilingual education was rendered illegal (see especially, Gándara & Hopkins, 2010). Bilingual education in the US has been progressively silenced, as English-only approaches are favored for the teaching of emergent bilingual students who need to develop English for academic purposes. Despite the recent growth of two-way bilingual education programs (often called ‘dual language’) and immersion bilingual education programs, as well as the continued existence of developmental maintenance bilingual education programs, the focus of transitional bilingual education programs has become the education, usually in English only, of emergent bilingual students, now called ‘English language learners’ (see García & Kleifgen, 2010, for a discussion of these discursive changes).

At the same time, however, the number of bilingual and emergent bilingual students who need to develop academic English in US schools has continued to grow, largely because of the global political economy, advances in technology, and the resultant transnational movement of people, information and products. Simultaneously, the US came to understand the importance of languages other than English for national security, especially after the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent US-led war on terror.¹ The 2006 National Security Language Initiative seeks to increase the number of US learners, speakers and teachers of ‘critical-need foreign languages’ from kindergarten to university through funding for flagship programs and other initiatives. Thus, the languages of ethnolinguistic communities have re-emerged as objects of study in the 21st century. With bilingualism restricted in public schools, the emphasis became the ‘heritage languages’ of American ethnolinguistic communities, especially at the tertiary level.

From the early 1980s, Guadalupe Valdés strongly advocated that secondary and tertiary institutions should develop alternative programs to foreign language education in order to teach Spanish to bilingual students in whose homes Spanish was spoken. She rightly argued that traditional foreign language programs were inadequate for these students (Valdés et al., 1980).

Although the term ‘heritage languages’ had been widely used in Canada to refer to the languages of ethnolinguistic communities other than English and French since the 1960s (e.g. Cummins, 1983; Cummins & Danesi, 1990), the name was not used extensively in the US until 1999, when the first National Conference on Heritage Languages in America was held at Long Beach, California. As García (2005) has argued, the term heritage language education was adopted as bilingual education faced greater restriction in its efforts to educate bilingual and biliterate Americans. Since then, scholarship on heritage language education has expanded, referring to the teaching of languages other than English to ethnolinguistic minorities for whom the language is ‘heritage’ (see Brinton et al., 2007). Guadalupe Valdés defines ‘heritage speaker’ as, ‘a student who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language’ (Valdés, 2000: 1, our italics). Brinton et al. (2007) define a heritage speaker as an ‘individual exposed to a language spoken at home, but educated primarily in English’ (p. ...