From global jobs to safe spaces: the diverse discourses that sell multilingual schooling in the USA

Abstract

While much research has demonstrated that English-only rhetoric negatively affects bilingual education for the children of US immigrants, few studies have examined the local negotiations and discourses that shape the development of multilingual programming for English-speaking students. Across the USA, educational leaders and policy-makers today struggle to develop language programs and explain the benefits of multilingualism. To examine these challenges at the local level, this study analyzed data from an 18-month ethnography documenting the development of an elementary (K-5) language immersion school in a predominantly monolingual city. Framed by neo-institutional theory, analyses focused on leaders' and parents' cultural scripts, or the discourses they employed during bottom-up planning processes. Findings demonstrate that the majority of leaders and diverse parents valued multilingualism as a right and resource for all students; however, parents' discourses also stressed the importance of language as a marker of identity, as well as the importance of having quality academics and safe, secure schooling. In other words, cultural scripts beyond those about multilingualism shaped the implementation of – and parents' choices for – language schools. Such results have implications for how school leaders establish, and sell, multilingual programming.

Keywords:

• cultural scripts
• language immersion education
• language policy
• parents
• school choice

Notes on contributor

Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Educational Policy at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. Her research focuses on the politics of language education, educational policy implementation, and immigrant families, especially integration in ‘new’ spaces. In her work, she uses both qualitative and quantitative methods and has published in a variety of outlets, including American Educational Research Journal, Educational Policy, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and the Journal of Educational Change.

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible by the kind participation of SIES teachers, administrators, and families. The author thanks the research participants and three graduate assistants who worked on this project: Tom Bober, Jesús Díaz, and Emily Hager. For their feedback and support, special thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers, editors, Emily Crawford, and the entire research team: Sarah Coppersmith, Sujin Kim, Angela Layton, Rhodesia McMillian, Jeffrey Pauls, Heather Quach, and Alina Slapac.

Funding

This project was funded by a University of Missouri Research Board Award (2009–2010).

Notes

1 Although foreign language and two-way programs are designed for different types of students, enrollment is variable across contexts. Sometimes foreign language immersion programs – such as SIES – include L1 speakers of the language of instruction, even though such schools aim to enrol L1 English speakers. Likewise, sometimes two-way programs include 70–90% of students who are L1 speakers of the language of instruction, even though they usually aim to include 50% from each language group.

2 In order to keep the research site anonymous, as required by Institutional Review Board agreements, this article does not use the actual names of any participants or locations. The section on Research Context, however, provides as many contextual details as possible, so readers can determine whether and how the findings could ‘transfer’ to other situations (Merriam, 2009).

3 When I use racial or ethnic markers, I usually follow the conventions of whatever report (e.g. US Census or previous research) or the individual participants that I am citing. I believe this provides readers with at least one perspective on how people are placed into categories (accurately or not), and how individuals identify themselves in any given context. Of course, being social constructs, I recognize that racial/ethnic terms can hinder readers' understandings of identities. For instance, there is significant diversity in the USA: for instance, the ‘Hispanic’ population includes both fifth-generation, L1 English-speaking citizens with Spanish ancestry, and recent L1 Quechua-/L2 Spanish-speaking migrants from Guatemala. Likewise, the category of ‘White’ does not provide any information about individuals' ethnic or linguistic heritage. However, in this context, it is important to provide some racial/ethnic characteristics, as having a substantial number of ‘White’ students (who were middle/upper socioeconomic class and U.S. born) attending a school alongside students viewed as ‘African-American,’ ‘Hispanic,’ low-income, and/or immigrants demonstrates the unique diversity of this study's context. Despite court rulings enforcing integration, many US urban schools remain very segregated, with over 80% of students who are not ‘White.’ For more information on the history of race in North America, see Smedley and Smedley (2011); the struggles of racial/ethnic research and framing, see Bhopal (2004) and Feagin (2009); and the importance of naming/studying ‘whiteness’ in US education, see Leonardo (2007).