Bilingualism for All?

Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Dual Language Education in the United States

Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng, Nicholas Subtirelu, Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng, Nicholas Subtirelu

• Editore: Multilingual Matters
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781800410060
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Linguistics

It is common for scholarly and mainstream discourses on dual language education in the US to frame these programs as inherently socially transformative and to see their proliferation in recent years as a natural means of developing more anti-racist spaces in public schools. In contrast, this book adopts a raciolinguistic perspective that points tothe contradictory role that these programs play in both reproducing and challenging racial hierarchies. The book includes 11 chapters that adopt a range of methodological techniques (qualitative, quantitative and textual), disciplinary perspectives (linguistics, sociology and anthropology) and language foci (Spanish, Hebrew and Korean) to examine the ways that dual language education programs in the US often reinforce the racial inequities that they purport to challenge.

1The Intersectionality of Neoliberal Classing with Raciolinguistic Marginalization in State Dual Language Policy: A Call for Locally Crafted Programs

M. Garrett Delavan, Juan A. Freire and Verónica E. Valdez

In 2008, the US state of Utah kicked-off a new policy initiative that was promoted as providing Utah students access to a one-size-fits-all model of dual language (DL) education backed with financial support. In this chapter, we draw on a raciolinguistic lens to analyze how this state-level language education policy commodified DL, how it promoted its proliferation and for whose benefit. In the process, we seek to join the theoretical conversation around raciolinguistics, which Alim (2016: 5) defines as ‘the interdisciplinary field of “language and race”’. We argue that an intersectional raciolinguistic perspective on the Utah DL policy can be an illustrative case study of the operation of the colonizing cultural phenomenon of propertied white aurality – our concept for how language use is heard and structured within capitalism and white supremacy. When Utah’s DL policy and the pattern of placement of its programs are looked at through this raciolinguistic lens, what comes to the fore is that racialization must be connected to socioeconomic classing in order to fully explain the inequitable access to DL for historically marginalized families, an intersectional analysis that reflects Leonardo’s concept of raceclass (2012) and Harris’ (1993) idea of whiteness as property in US legal history. The significance of the findings is broader than just Utah because a number of states in the US have noticed and even emulated its DL model. Utah’s model follows the policy logic of the foreign language lineage of second language education that draws on the Canadian foreign language immersion model, whose traditional focus has been on building multilingualism within majority language speakers of the national context (Lambert & Tucker, 1972), whereas we follow the bilingual education lineage, which centers the cultural and linguistic interests and needs of raciolinguistically marginalized students (Valdez et al., 2016a).

Despite its reputation as a heavily white state, Latinx individuals constitute 14% of the state’s population, roughly matching their presence in the US as a whole (US Census, 2019a, 2019b). With 30% of Utah’s population under 18 years of age versus 22.4% nationally (US Census, 2019a, 2019b), it is important to note that Utah’s public schools are 26% students of color (with Latinx, Pacific Islanders representing the largest groups) and 7.5% of students are designated as ‘English language learners,’ with Spanish being the largest minoritized language represented in schools (Utah State Board of Education [USBE], 2019). Nationally, about half of the public-school population are students of color, and 9.6% are designated as ‘English language learners’ (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). Overall, Utah had the second fastest growth rate of residents who spoke a language besides English at home – 20% between 2010 and 2016 – spurred by children of immigrants (Camarota & Zeigler, 2017). Spanish is followed by Pacific Islander languages (Tongan and Samoan) in prominence, with 15% of school-age children speaking a language other than English in the home, including Native American languages, such as Navajo (US Census, 2019b). This significant and geographically dispersed presence in Utah of multilingual racialized communities is often overlooked, evidence of which lies in the fact that, historically, Utah’s public school system has faced US Office of Civil Rights investigations over racial discrimination, including lack of attention to language-minoritized students, that continued to 2017 (Sayers, 1996; Stevens, 2018).

Our chapter is divided into four sections: First, we offer a theoretical framework that elaborates how socioeconomic classing is just as tied to linguistic positioning and racialization as those latter two are to each other. Next, we describe the data set on which we base this chapter. Third, we use an intersectional raciolinguistic framework to reanalyze our previous findings on Utah DL in ways that make this US state’s cautionary tale even more relevant to other contexts, whether in the US or internationally. Three themes emerged for how Utah’s policy has demonstrated raciolinguistic classing, and we deliberately chose economic metaphors to name them in order to emphasize the pattern of economic discourse camouflaging the racial calculation: Mass production of DL programs by innovating a top-down, state-level one-size-fits-all model rather than a co-constructed process at the district and school community level that is responsive to local demographics and community needs; mass marketing of the economic benefits of elite multilingualism and multiculturalism for all to promote the DL policy to privileged audiences; creating mass displacement of equity and heritage discourses and of historically marginalized students from DL. Finally, we offer a way forward for those who want DL in their locale to avoid perpetuating the status quo. We argue that, allowing equitable space to remain open for locally crafted DL programs that respond to their communities’ racialized and classed positionalities allows all students to benefit from the proliferation of DL to more learners, not just the privileged.

Joining the Raciolinguistics Conversation with an Emphasis on Classing

We understand culture, policy, and pedagogy through a lens of discourses – ways of construing the world and human practices that either perpetuate or contest social power arrangements. Consequently, for this chapter, we read raciolinguistic understandings (and many of the prior ideas its users have drawn on) as a complementary lens to critical discourse analysis as a theoretical orientation or, stated broadly, ‘analysis of the codes of power’ (Flores & Rosa, 2015: 165). We follow Rogers and colleagues (2016: 1216) in defining critical discourse analysis in education (descriptively rather than prescriptively) as a theoretical orientation used to connect more local processes to societal processes ‘through description, interpretation, and explanation’ of discursive phenomena. Our particular point of entry into the conversation theorizing raciolinguistic discourse is Flores and Rosa’s (2015: 168–169) call for ‘shifting language education from inadvertently perpetuating the racial status quo to participating in struggles against the ideological processes associated with the white speaking and white listening subject,’ two concepts that build on the model of the white gaze, that is, the white point of view. To speak of the cultural centrality of the white speaking and white listening subject more succinctly (and parallel to the white gaze) we use the concept of aurality – that is, the act or sense of hearing. White aurality (Thompson, 2017) is thus the seemingly natural or common-sense privileging of (a) how one talks/sounds in order to perform whiteness and (b) how whiteness acts as an unmarked norm against which language varieties are legitimated or othered. White aurality allows us to succinctly summarize how white supremacy in the US and around the world also operates through how ways of speaking are (de)valued.

Rosa and Flores (2017: 636) deepen this analysis by proposing that such a raciolinguistic perspective can perceive ways in which language varieties and racial categories were discursively co-imagined historically and are continually reproduced together in contemporary spaces such as bilingual education. They see possibilities for intersectional analysis with this lens where ‘assemblages of signs and identities configured in particular contexts’ are studied for how they produce consequences and for whom; building on Zeus Leonardo’s (2012) raceclass perspective, Rosa and Flores highlight the interconnected, evolving histories of classism plus racism (capitalism plus white supremacy) that have often played out through the medium of language. We take up this call by reading Utah’s DL model and associated policies as just such an assemblage of identity-bearing discourses. Because socioeconomic class was so clearly linked to race and linguistic positionality in our prior findings, reexamining and resynthesizing Utah’s assemblage of DL policy and its promotion immediately suggested that we spend time theorizing the concept of a propertied (economically privileged) version of the gaze/aurality concept. Just as other scholars have used ‘propertied gaze’ as a means to efficiently talk about the point of view of classes above the poor, whether middle class or elites (Bergland, 2000), propertied aurality summarizes the ways in which capitalism and classing valorize, other, and standardize people’s language varieties and repertoires.

There are three points we would like to add to the conversation around the intersection of white aurality with capitalism and classing. First, the raciolinguistic framework has analysis of propertied aurality built into it, which should not be overlooked by those who take it up. If we are to ‘account for the workings of white supremacy within global capitalism’ or simply ‘racial capitalism’ (Rosa & Flores, 2017: 640–641) then the Utah case demonstrates what a mistake it would be not to take seriously the moments when classing or marketing discourse becomes a key theme in one’s data. Yet we do not mean to imply that all raciolinguistic inquiry must forefront classing in order to be valid. Rosa and Flores (2017) allude to Bonfiglio’s (2002) powerful discursive history of the shift of the dominant US accent from the Northeast accent to the (Mid)West accent during the first half of the 20th century. The US standard moved away from centers of wealth rather than toward them, as had happened in other industrialized nations. The only explanation that sufficed was the ideological portrayal of the (Mid)West as the nation’s least racially ‘contaminated’ space, a new ‘heartland’ of whiteness and non-immigrant-ness. Considering this context of standardization in the US around white aurality much more than propertied aurality, we are not making a claim that economics or class are always central, only that one should test for whether they are one of the central forces intersecting.

Second, a raciolinguistic perspective is grounded in a critique of the endurance of colonialism in the present moment. We understand colonialism as an inherently economic or classed process that subsequently produced the discourses of racialization and standardized language that endure to this day as propertied white aurality. Moore (2015) advocates for a theory of capitalism as a new knowledge paradigm that began to alter landscapes and consume resources at an accelerated rate after 1450. A new cash crop system of agriculture was the original laboratory of the mass production economic model – one of our key analytical metaphors – and it co-emerged with racialization, slavery and colonization. Built into the fabric of the new economic logic was another of our key analytical metaphors: the mass displacement of ‘in the way’ or ‘disposable’ populations who were forced into labor, deprived of territory and exposed to European diseases. Yet the mass displacement was also discursive and cultural: ways of living, languaging and thinking were directly or indirectly pushed to the margins of social space through the propertied white aurality of the colonizing population.

Racialization and white supremacy became the legitimizing discourse for the globalization of this once localized system of economic and cultural value. Omi and Winant (2015: 115) argue that a racial system that was merely brutal sociocultural sorting in the first few centuries of colonization became ‘newly difficult to justify’ amidst the Enlightenment’s discourses of rights and freedoms that the ascendant economic elites were asserting; hence race was biologized and naturalized through new scientific discourses. Simultaneously, the solidification of the nation-state form in the 1700–1800s further fossilized language in ways that produced a more fully hegemonic, monolingual (and racialized) ideology of languages. Hutton (2000) argues that European linguists began at that time to theorize the affinity among Indo-European languages and the concept of an Aryan (supreme, white) race. These ‘tribal beliefs of academic linguists’ infused white supremacy discourse with an even deeper connection to language via ‘fictive identities that fused language and race as political myths’ of the nation-state era (Hutton, 2000: 70–71). In some sense, white supremacy and language standardization operated as a marketing campaign to ‘sell’ the legitimacy of the colonial order, the capitalist class system, and the new ‘democratic’ nation states run by the business class rather than the aristocracy. Literal, undifferentiated mass marketing of products had its heyday between the 1880s and 1950s in the US (Tedlow & Jones, 2014), but all commodities of the capitalist era were marketed in some way in the media forms of the era. Mass marketing attempts to sell products with a homogenous appeal to an entire market without considering the diversity of tastes or needs within it, which necessarily includes some form of privileging (or constructing) a sense of what the majority wants; it is the opposite of niche or segmented marketing, which targets – or, arguably, creates – particular sectors of the market with more differentiated messages (Tedlow & Jones, 2014). Marketing is clearly a form of discourse by which people are invited or persuaded into subjectivities of need for or affinity with particular commodities. The effect of the choice of mass rather than niche marketing is to participate in reinforcing a dominant, majoritarian subjectivity as superior or normal. Mass marketing in the US thus used and reinforced propertied white aurality.

Third, a key theme that emerged from our work on Utah DL policy was that economic discourses were clearly ...