‘I'll be the hero’: how adolescents negotiate intersectional identities within a high school dual-language program

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine how adolescents in a dual-language program negotiate intersectional identities through interaction, while engaged in small-group exploratory talk around the task of a collaborative-writing project. We recognize that while dual-language settings can help adolescents build relationships with ethnolinguistically different peers who might be otherwise tracked into separate classrooms, dual-language spaces, nested within a larger racialized U.S. system, also have potential to reify marginalized identities. Using a microethnographic lens, we examine how students in an extra-curricular high school dual-language Spanish-English program negotiate intersectional identities while engaging in small-group work to write a bilingual book to share with elementary students. We found that the small-group setting was a space where students negotiated both marginalized and privileged identities, sometimes related to language and other times related to a host of other factors. We consider how talking directly with adolescents about the roles that might be placed on them as participants in dual-language programs can enlist them in the work of creating dual-language spaces that validate the various identities students seek to take up.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual language
• two-way immersion
• adolescents
• secondary education
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Authors’ original program-description language preserved throughout.

2 Individual and institutional names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Youth-Nex: The University of Virginia Center to Promote Effective Youth Development.

Notes on contributors

April S. Salerno

April S. Salerno is an assistant professor of English as a second language and language teacher education at the University of Virginia.

Amanda K. Kibler

Amanda K. Kibler is an associate professor in language education in the College of Education at Oregon State University.

Christine N. Hardigree

Christine N. Hardigree is an assistant professor of adolescent literacy in the education department at Iona College.