“Everybody Wants a Choice” in Dual Language Education of El Nuevo Sur: Whiteness as the Gloss for Everybody in Media Discourses of Multilingual Education

ABSTRACT

Georgia and North Carolina are part of what some call the New Latinx South, a region where Latinx populations more than doubled recently. Both states have struggled to educate language minoritized students (evidenced by low graduation rates), yet are among the top three states for numbers of dual language (DL) programs in the Southeast. This model integrates English speakers and speakers of a minoritized language to promote biliteracy for all, disrupting a legacy of English-only education. Such contradictions, along with the Southeast’s complex history of racial relations, create tensions and opportunities for DL. Through media content analysis, informed by LatCrit, we examined discourses about DL to determine ways DL is framed and conceived. Findings demonstrate how public discourses perpetuated notions of whom DL should serve, and for what purposes. The discussion identifies spaces of resistance DL supporters can engage to promote democratic, rather than neoliberal, articulations of DL.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual language education
• dual language immersion
• foreign language
• neoliberalism
• two-way immersion

Notes

1. We use the term “language minoritized,” to indicate linguistic groups that may be labeled minority by whitestream society (Urrieta, 2010), and who have been historically marginalized, “but who are by no means ‘minor’” (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017, p. 407). While the terms “bilingual” or “dual-language learners” are more positive and accurate about these students’ linguistic abilities, we use the term “language minoritized students” to avoid conflating them with bilingual or dual-language learners from the dominant group.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Cervantes-Soon

Claudia Cervantes-Soon is Associate Professor of Bilingual Education at Arizona State University. Her research interests center on critical ethnographic and anticolonial approaches to study the cultural production, pedagogies, identity and agency enacted among historically marginalized communities and youth in bilingual, bicultural, and borderlands contexts.

James Gambrell

James Gambrell is Associate Professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education in the Inclusive Education Department at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on bilingual education including language policy and planning, bilingual teacher preparation pathways, and classroom practices that engage language minoritized students, families, and communities.

G. Sue Kasun

G. Sue Kasun is Associate Professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Georgia State University and Director of its Center for Transnational & Multilingual Education. Her research interests include decolonial approaches to education, particularly bridging understandings in ways of knowing and in transnational ways of being across both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Wenyang Sun

Wenyang Sun is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies and Literacies at the School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on bilingual education, heritage language maintenance, Asian American studies, and critical multicultural education. In particular, her research centers on how the larger sociopolitical context shapes the experiences of language-minoritized students.

Juan A. Freire

Juan A. Freire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Brigham Young University. His research concentrates on critical issues in dual language education, including the development of policy and planning, and multicultural/bilingual teacher preparation.

Lisa M. Dorner

Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and a Cambio Center Faculty Fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research centers on language policy and planning, educational policy implementation, and immigrant childhoods, especially children’s and families’ integration in “new” spaces.