Teaching Arabic to children and youth in the United States: between love and indictment

ABSTRACT

This bilingual qualitative study draws on translingual interviews conducted in 2017 and 2018 with seven Arabic bilingual teachers in Central Ohio, United States. The conceptual framework centers on raciolinguistic perspective and decolonial love pedagogies. The interview questions focused on: teachers’ pedagogical practices and challenges and opportunities (educational, social, and political) that they face while teaching Arabic. Findings assert that the teachers had a deep understanding of the impact of raciolinguistic ideologies and perspective on teaching Arabic and highlighted the implicit and explicit sociopolitical constraints that limit their students’ ability to use Arabic in contexts beyond the home environment. The findings also suggested that the bilingual Arabic teachers wrote themselves and their students differently from the raciolinguistic perspective imposed on them by focusing on decolonial love pedagogies. The implications require more radical intimate inquiry in the light of Orientalist and neoliberal politics of bilingual education in U.S. that pertain to Arabic education.

KEYWORDS:

• Raciolinguistic perspective
• Arabic bilingualism
• teaching Arabic
• racialization
• indicted languages
• language indictment
• Arabic as an indicted language
• decolonial pedagogies of love
• language education

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association Division G.

Notes on contributors

Youmna Deiri

Youmna Deiri, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M International University. She also serves as a Program Co-Chair for the Critical Educators for Social Justice SIG at the American Educational Research Association. Previously, Dr Deiri held a Dean’s Diversity Postdoctoral Research Fellowship position at the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology (EHE) at Ohio State University, where she also earned her PhD in Teacher Education. Her scholarship focuses on Arabic bilingualism, early childhood education, and bi/multilingual intimate qualitative inquiry.