Tension and Contention in Language Education for Latinxs in the United States

Experience and Ethics in Teaching and Learning

Glenn A. Martínez, Robert W. Train

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315400969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Inglés

Applying a critical lens to language education, this book explores the tensions that Latinx students face in relation to their identities, social and institutional settings, and other external factors. Across diverse contexts, these students confront complex debates and contestable affirmations that intersect with their lived experiences and social histories. Martinez and Train highlight the pedagogic and ethical urgency of teacher responsibility, learner agency and social justice in critically addressing the consequences, constraints, and affordances of the language education that Latinx students experience in historically-situated and institutionally defined spaces of practice, ideology and policy.

Reframing language studies to take into account the roles of power, inequality, and social settings, this book provokes dialogue between areas of language education that rarely interface. Through privileging the learner experience, the book provides a window to the contested spaces across language education and generates new opportunities for engagement and action. Offering nuanced and insightful analyses, this book is ideal for scholars, language researchers, language teacher educators and graduate students in all areas of language education.

1

STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The Latino Education Crisis

Cindy García, a senior at John C. Fremont High School on San Pedro Street in south central Los Angeles, was featured in Soledad O’Brien’s CNN documentary Latino in America (O’Brien 2009). Cindy is one of seven García’s featured in the O’Brien piece. Her story is woven into a tapestry of Latinx experience that includes aspiring Hollywood actors, immigration activists, entrepreneurs, and clergy. Cindy’s story, like that of countless other Latinxs in schools across the country, underscores intense human struggles between social structure and individual agency, overwhelming personal tensions between present and future, and deep individual dissonance and resonance between good and bad. These struggles, tensions and dissonances, furthermore, are couched in a unique language-ness that would seem to characterize the so-called Latino education crisis. By “language-ness” we mean that, while not all of the barriers in schooling faced by Cindy are related to “language” –understood as named, bounded and invented entities – the experience of life in, with and through multiple language practices – her languaging – seeps into and inflects each barrier in singular ways. The language-ness of Cindy’s experience thus calls into question invented linguistic categories, and manifests instead a fluidity of her languaging practices that interfaces at multiple circuits within the complexity of her lived experience (Becker 1995; Blommaert 2005; 2013; Canagarajah 2007; García & Wei 2014; Makoni & Pennycook 2007; Pennycook 2010).

BOX 1.1 CINDY GARCÍA’S STORY

“My ninth grade year,” says Cindy, “I didn’t think school was very important.” She elaborates: “I started hanging out with the wrong people, I didn’t care, I would ditch school, like, a lot.” The high schooler characterizes her ninth grade experience as an overwhelming and all-consuming present. “It was just …” she pauses and briefly glances towards the floor. “Bad,” she says, as she frowns and shakes her head. Lamenting her situation, her reflection is fraught with tensions. In describing the tremendous obstacles she faces in obtaining her high school diploma, she says: “that’s my consequences. Now, I’m having to deal with that.” She discusses a change of course in the twelfth grade and explains: “my sister definitely would be a role model when it comes to graduating because she did it,” she pauses, “with a kid … with a baby she did it.” Cindy’s motivation and her sense of the future are grounded in the experience of her sister as she overcame the barriers amassed against her. Cindy goes on to describe her own barriers:

It’s constantly a struggle with money for my family, I mean, I know for everyone else it is too, but, you know, I need to be able to work and like help my mom, you know, she’s always been there for us, she’s always been there for us, you know, whatever we need she’s found a way to give it to us. So, why can’t we give back, you know? It’s our turn.

Cindy’s sense of the future, therefore, is rooted in an ethical appeal of responsibility and reciprocity. She connects this appeal directly to her schooling. “We need to go to school and help, you know, now that she’s sick and now that she can’t.” Success in schooling, however, is only one aspect of Cindy’s ethical commitment to her mother. “My mom does need a lot of the time for me to translate because she’s not from here, she wasn’t born here.” Cindy reflects on the connections she sees between her educational experience and her mother’s language experience as a Spanish-speaking immigrant: “So, there’s just a certain amount of things she can help me with.” Cindy abruptly thumps her chest and says, “and then, it’s me.” The ethical appeal within Cindy’s sense of the future, however, reverts back to the all-consuming present. “It’s hard,” she says. “It’s hard,” she repeats. “It’s like I feel like I don’t have time to deal with my own things.” This realization leads her to reflect critically on the fault lines between social determination and individual responsibility: “I think Latinos drop out the most because they carry way more responsibility.” Despite these barriers, Cindy’s story concludes on a high note:

I want to go to school. I want to get a good career and I want to enjoy life. I want to have kids, raise a nice big family, have a bunch of good kids. I think that’s my dream.

Cindy’s story underscores the complexities and tensions that constitute the Latino education crisis. Her story unveils a lived experience that is shaped by language-ness. She lives her experience as very much her own, immediately and deeply particular to herself. And yet, Cindy’s experience also emerges as shared at the intersections of experience she identifies with the people around her. She is not alone. Her struggles and the responsibilities she carries, for example, are located in her interventions on behalf of her mom who is not “from here,” who was not “born here.” At the same time, however, the language-ness of her experience also becomes a beacon of her ethical orientation. In this book, our aim is to address this language-ness and, in so doing, to uncover and explore the complex tensions that arise around language and education in the lived experience of Latinxs.

The Latino education crisis and the stories of young people like Cindy García have emerged as fundamental – historical and ongoing – sites of concern in the 21st century for their human, social and political consequences (Bedolla 2005; 2012; Garcia Bedolla & Michelson 2012; Gándara & Contreras 2009; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco & Todorova 2008). Dismal school completion rates and an obvious entrenchment of academic underachievement have mired the nation’s fastest growing school-aged population in “a state of crisis.” Some argue that the Latino education crisis is a statistical artifact produced by the continual waves of immigrant children entering the school system (Suárez-Orozco et al. 2008). Others, however, contend that the crisis reflects intractable inequities that have affected Latinx students for decades (Gándara & Contreras 2009). From either perspective, language education is a key area of concern within the Latino education crisis. For those who argue that the crisis exists as a result of an ever-intensifying number of English language learners entering the system, redoubled efforts in improving language education may point to a solution. For those who contend that the crisis exists as a result of intractable underlying inequities, language education may very well be the problem. As Gándara and Contreras (2009) have argued, “the controversies and debates over language have distracted the Latino community from the essential inequities they face” (p. 149). Either way, the Latino education crisis implicates language educators in unique and consequential ways. As language educators from different social and institutional contexts, it is our aim in this book to tease out the embeddedness of language education within the larger state of crisis in Latino education. How do language educators build up or break down the barriers faced by young people such as Cindy García? Is there an ethical and epistemic crisis stemming from how language professionals conceptualize or gloss over and value or devalue the diverse and complex knowledge and experiences of language and speakerhood lived by Latinxs inside and outside the classroom, school, and university? What tensions and fault lines within language education reinforce or mask the “language-ness” rooted within Cindy’s struggles? In considering these questions, we seek to contribute a critical and ethical reflection that will engage language educators located in various institutional spaces and that will honor and elevate the hopes and dreams of Latinxs like Cindy García.

The Historical Depth of the Latino Education Crisis

The Latino education crisis has been a cause of concern among educators for years. A leading voice in addressing this concern was George I. Sánchez. Born in 1906 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sánchez entered the teaching ranks at age 16, earned master’s degrees in educational psychology and Spanish from the University of Texas in 1931, and went on to complete a doctorate in educational administration from the University of California at Berkeley. The larger part of his academic career was spent as professor of education and Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and as an activist in organizations such as LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) and the American Council of Spanish-Speaking People (see Blanton 2015).

Sánchez’s concern with education centered around three main issues: (1) the inequitable use of intelligence testing, (2) de facto school segregation, and 3) what he referred to as the “dual language handicap.” Standardized IQ testing in schools, Sánchez argued in his pioneering critiques, constituted the primary means through which Latinx, specifically Mexican-American, children were subordinated within the educational system (e.g. Sánchez 1932; 1934). He further argued that the results of IQ testing, which fed a false narrative of the genetically-based intellectual inferiority of Mexican-American children, were nothing more than an artifact of racism masked in pseudo-scientific garb. His longitudinal analysis of IQ test scores demonstrated that Mexican-American children scored lower upon entering school but reached parity with standard scores within three years of school matriculation. This difference, he argued, revealed that the source of lower IQ test scores among Mexican-American children was less about the genetic underpinnings of their intellectual ability and more about the vast sociocultural divide between the contexts and experiences of Mexican-American children and the contexts and experiences privileged in testing. Connected to the bias of IQ testing, the issue of de facto school segregation also loomed large in Sánchez’s thought around the Latino education crisis. For Sánchez, school segregation was not simply another manifestation of racial bias. Rather, he contended that school segregation constituted an imminent threat to democracy itself (Sánchez 1951):

It is my firm conviction that segregation is inconsistent with, and inimical to, the principles and ideals upon which the American public school is founded. … [I]magine what the results would have been had we segregated, in the public schools, every immigrant group that came to this country speaking a foreign language. The genius of our powers of assimilation and of our powers of Americanization lies largely in our public school – a school that is indeed a melting pot and a training ground for democracy. (Sánchez 1951: 38)

Sánchez’s arguments differed from those put forward by his contemporaries, not only in their forward-looking appeal, but more importantly in their retrospective insight. “Unlike [Carlos] Castañeda,” observes Mario T. García (1989: 254), “who dwelt little on the post-Mexican War history of Mexican Americans in his efforts to stress ethnic harmony rather than conflict, Sánchez in a more militant and bolder fashion, reminiscent of later Chicano writers, countered that the post-Mexican War period was the key to the plight of Mexican Americans and of their second-class position in the United States.” The historicity of Sánchez’s arguments led him to a more profound consideration of both the causes and the results of educational inequity for Spanish-speaking children. Sánchez meticulously dismembered and demolished the prevailing arguments that segregation was needed due to the “language handicap” that Mexican children brought with them to the schooling experience. He carefully crafted a counter-narrative that placed the notion of the “language handicap” in a more appropriate light. He argued not for a “language handicap” on the part of students, as his mentor Herschel T. Manuel had done years earlier, but instead for a “dual language handicap” in which linguistic deficiency was shared both on the part of the school and on the part of the student. Teachers, administrators and school boards, he argued, demonstrated the same kind of linguistic deficiencies that they attributed to the Spanish-speaking students who arrived at their doors. In 1954, Sánchez probed the matter:

I sometimes wonder if the problem of bilingualism is not as much due to the language handicap of the educator as it is to that of the child. We use terms – bilingual, Spanish-speaking, language handicap, and the like – oftentimes without clear reference to their meanings or applicability. Or, often, the meaning each of us attaches to one of these terms may have only a remote relationship to its true meaning or to the meanings attached to the same term by others. And so, in dealing with the problem, the educator finds himself in that confused state common to children whose language development has not kept pace with their acquisition of the symbols of communication. (Sánchez 1954: 13)

The school system’s failure to recognize its own language handicap thus became an excuse for school segregation, and for an unjustified reliance on IQ testing, that fulfilled a prophecy that teachers, administrators and school boards had fashioned beforehand.

Language in general, and Spanish in particular, thus emerged as a unifying centrifugal force in Sánchez’s thinking. While he argued for limited use of Spanish as a viable instructional tool in schools, he also maintained that Spanish-language maintenance was largely the result of the school system’s failure to effectively assimilate Spanish-speaking children.¹ In his 1970 article entitled “Spanish in the Southwest” Sánchez wrote: “The conservation of the heritage of the Spanish language is an eloquent illustration that it is indeed an ill wind that does not blow somebody some good!” (Sánchez 1970: 25). His ambiguous view of the role of Spanish in the pursuit of educational equity was stretched to its limit in an exchange with Joshua Fishman in the early 1960s. In his recent biography of George I. Sánchez, Carlos Blanton describes the tense interaction:

In the spring of 1961 [Joshua Fishman] asked for Sánchez’s expertise on how Mexican Americans maintained their vernaculars. To Fishman, lingering vernaculars and ethnicity represented submerged resistance to the ethnocentrism of white Anglo-Saxons. Sánchez was confused over Fishman’s positive perceptions of native language retention. For Sánchez they were proof that the schools were not doing their jobs and that the dominant society wanted to keep Mexican Americans poor, ignorant, and on the farms as economically and racially exploited groups. Fishman prevailed upon Sánchez to write an essay on Mexican Americans and language retention for the project’s eventual book. Sánchez turned in his lengthy historical analysis, and Fishman, a few months later, rejected it as not being interpretively in step with the rest of the essays. Sánchez complained to Arthur Campa, “Maybe I am wrong, but I am convinced that Spanish has been maintained in the Southwest not because of any positive measures, but rather because the schools have been so bad and have not taught English!” The resulting Language Loyalty in the United States was a key early text in the emerging bilingual education movement. And Sánchez’s ideas were not in it. (Blanton 2015: 230)

Notwithstanding his view of Spanish language maintenance as part of a “language trap,” Sánchez’s particular view of Americanization – rooted in the ideals of democracy – and Pan-Americanism – grounded in the Good Neighbor aspiration for productive international relations across the Americas – drew him to a positive view of multilingualism in general and Spanish-English bilingualism in particular. In his essay “History, Culture, and Education,” published posthumously in 1997, he wrote:

the fact remains that, in the Southwest, Spanish has been retained as a major language primarily by default of the institutions of social incorporation. This default, although producing unfortunate results in other spheres, could be turned to a tremendous advantage. Some suggestions are made in this paper. Others will occur to those who recognize bilingualism and multilingualism as of great value not only...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series Editor Introduction
• 1. State of Emergency in Language and Education in the 21st Century
• 2. Beyond Invention: The Language-ness of Experience in Institutional Perspective
• 3. Experiences of Mobility and the Mobilization of Experience
• 4. Becoming Transformative Translingual Professionals
• 5. Language Experience in Language Education for Latinxs: Experiencing Criticality, Historicity and Ethicality in Our Times
• Index