Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D.

teacher, researcher, life-long learner

Change…& Bilingualism for All?

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Exactly one year ago today, I sat at work and saw email after email announce the closing of schools, the pausing of travel, what felt like the shutting down of society: change was certainly upon us. The COVID-19 pandemic had shuttered school buildings, forced learning (or the attempt at learning) to go online, and entirely changed our ways of life, from shopping to working to gathering with friends. And then came more reports of Black men killed by police, not to mention further injustices and inequities to various marginalized groups laid bare by the pandemic: higher rates of COVID infection and death among low-income, Black and immigrant populations, and less access to educational opportunities in urban and rural districts across the country as the pandemic spread far and wide.

In the midst of all of this, I had the opportunity to re-analyze data collected about the development of language immersion schooling in the Midwest for an edited book titled, Bilingualism for All? Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Dual Language Education in the United States by Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng, and Nicholas Subtirelu. I see this book as part of broader conversations about educational and racial equity happening across the country right now, as we considered who has access to bilingual programs and how they work or not for marginalized populations.

Historically, the phrase “bilingual education” brings to mind specialized programs for children from immigrant families who speak languages other than English at home. In the past 20 years, however, there has been widespread development of what is now called “dual language” education, which ideally (though with many challenges) brings bilingual education to a wider group of students. Some programs aim to purposefully integrate immigrant/transnational youth who speak a shared home language (e.g., Spanish) with English-dominant youth. Other programs are designed to support bilingual and biliteracy development in children who come from mostly monolingual, English-speaking homes. This is the kind of program I followed for nearly 10 years.

I have to say, it was an amazing school and educational opportunity for a very diverse group of students. This program was designed by a bilingual African-American woman and met its main aim to bring bilingual education to Black youth whose families had never had this kind of opportunity before. However, as I discuss in the chapter of Bilingualism for All?, state and federal policies that focused on English language arts development promoted a slow shift in the school away from their founding aims. After many years of reportedly low standardized test scores, the school was pressured to change its approach to language education; as part of this, they decided that students needed to perform proficiently on English exams before they could be taught content material in another language. Essentially, this positioned Black youth in the school as “language-less” – as not even being competent in their own native language of English – completely neglecting the actual multilingual and multiliterate capacities that Black youth have and do bring to school. (For more on the richness and history of Black language in the U.S., check out the Black Language Syllabus and Marcyliena Morgan’s work.)

The change at this school was slow; it was subtle. But it had real material consequences in terms of whether and how Black youth from this city could continue to access and develop bilingualism in a way that has been possible for students who live in more advantaged circumstances. In future work with schools and educators, this underscores the importance of studying change itself, of asking why and when do we change our educational approaches, and what are the outcomes of doing so? What new policies or practices cause us to position a certain group of students in a certain way? Does this result in inequities of access or opportunity? How can we advocate for (re)changing those policies to (re)position youth and instead recognize and center their capacity and creativity?

For sure, the only lasting truth is change. The hopeful news is that if we inquire into our circumstances, if we consider a range of perspectives and unintended consequences of the policies around us, we may be able to bring about helpful rather than hurtful change. How have our current circumstances changed you? And what change do you want to bring about?

Rethinking Educational Equity

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You know that image of a fence, with the kids trying to peer over it, but they can’t unless they have different sized boxes? We often use that image in education, to highlight differences between equality and equity. We discuss how giving everyone the same access or kind of education might be “equal,” but not equitable: providing the same things in education (the same size box) doesn’t actually provide similar access or fair outcomes for kids (the ability to peer over the fence). We talk about the need to create different sized boxes. We have to differentiate to be equitable, and educators do try: we provide special education services for the child with autism; we design English language development or bilingual courses for children and their transnational, immigrant families; we offer counseling for students living with trauma.

And what about racial equity? What kind of boxes have we created here? Or is this even the question we should be asking? In a recent blog post, Dr. Anjalé Welton points out that thinking about equity in terms of building boxes puts most of our attention on individual children and what they need. It implies that if we simply fix the kid by offering some additional services, we’ve achieved equity. But sometimes we need to rethink – or open up – the whole fence, don’t we?

Today, we stand at a new crossroads. We’re living, right now, with a pandemic that we have not figured out how to manage. We’re living, right now, in a world built by and still defined by colonialism and institutionalized racism. Our current health crisis has only exacerbated and shown a bright light on the inequalities and inequities that exist all around us: in health, education, economic opportunity. It might be time – not to provide a new set of boxes – but to take down the whole fence, open new doors, and start all over.

Thinking about what we might do, what we need to do, in education helps me understand the idea to defund the police. It’s the systems around us, that have been built over centuries, that are hardest to fight. It’s the desire to integrate our schools, but the reality that real estate agencies still guide families to particular neighborhoods and many white families still self-segregate by settling in mostly white suburbs. It’s the desire to improve the achievement gap with policies — but those policies only further the deficit discourses of racialized and minoritized groups by constantly reporting what they “lack.” It’s the belief in standardized tests to classify one’s worth and opportunity to go to college — . . . and on and on.

Next year, school will not look like it ever has. And this could be an incredible opportunity. How can we rethink education around the whole child, the whole community? How can we work together to share ideas and resources? How can we move away from defining kids as a standardized test score?

There are amazing things we can do if we demand it of ourselves. But we have to take our time, and we must take some risks. What if we don’t start school on August 24? What if we don’t use the ACT and SAT for college admittance? What if schooling is not age-graded? What if learning is self-paced, with small group facilitation as needed? What if we valued the trades the way we value “college for all”? What if school districts provided learning opportunities beyond “K-12”? What if learning meant more than reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic — or uploading 30 worksheets every Friday? What if high school credits included internship hours from a job? What if high school didn’t have to end at age 18?

Right now, in the middle of a pandemic, we are asking educators to do more than ever — with less than ever. Teachers have become professional fundraisers, IT specialists, computer delivery personnel, and video producers. As much as any of us can follow their lead, let’s jump in, and let’s re-work our ideas of equity. We don’t have to build new boxes to jump over the fence. We have to tear it down, together, open doors, and (re)build something new.

A Culture of Inclusion – or Not?

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This image is a hand drawing of a photograph from a school district website ~2015. On their homepage, this district had a rotating, colorful set of pictures, with children working together, learning, and studying. At a glance, we might feel pride if this was our district, agreeing with the words written next to the images: “innovation, vision, leaders, inclusion, rising to the challenge.”

But we must take a closer look: Who are the children in the images? Who is centered? Who actually feels included in the district, and who is considered a challenge?

In a recent publication, “School District Responses to Cultural and Linguistic Change: Competing Discourses of Equity, Competition, and Community,” Dr. Sujin Kim and I explore these questions through a study of website design and district visions and missions (as of July 1, 2020, the full text is available at this link). We found that some district websites used a promotional genre “to sell” their quality to viewers (presumably families who either live or might be moving to the area). One website was quite jarring, putting words like “innovation” and “vision” next to white children, while placing the phrase “rising to the challenge” nearby the only Black student pictured. Meanwhile, Asian children, who made up a sizable number of students at this district at the time, were only ever featured with their faces blurred out or backs to the camera, as in the picture above, which suggests the very opposite of “inclusion.” Only one district in our study employed a narrative genre, using their website to tell the story of their development as a community that welcomed immigrants and refugees, with accompanying photos of smiling children with different skin tones and clothes, such as hijabs.

In our current times, it is (again) all too apparent that our country needs to learn that #BlackLivesMatter, that people of color, including immigrant families and multilingual indigenous peoples, have not been included, have been disenfranchised, have even in some cases been eliminated. I hope that by raising an awareness of the discourses around us, we can begin to break these cycles of exclusion and removal. This includes carefully attending to the ways that pictures and words come together in our lives, which are increasingly displayed and lived online: What subtle (or not so subtle) messages are they sending? How can we change harmful discourses by re-working images and words that we use and that we choose to share?

Tweet your ideas to #ChangeTheDiscourse @lisamdorner

Multilingual Family Engagement

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Migration. Whether searching for greater opportunities or enriching experiences, or escaping poverty or war, people are on the move. Worldwide, the United Nations reports that more than 250 million people do not live in the country where they were born, an increase of 49% since 2000. In the United States, the percentage of children who have at least one immigrant parent or caregiver grew from 18% to 27% between 1997 and 2017. More than 20% of households speak a language other than English. Some schools that have never served students who speak other languages now have to design English language development or bilingual education programs. (Dorner, Song, Kim, & Trigos-Carrillo, 2019)

In this recent article published in Literacy Today, colleagues and I reflected on how schools manage this kind of change, especially: How do they integrate, support, and reach out to immigrant, multilingual families? Research has long suggested that traditional family engagement in schools fails to incorporate diverse communities in meaningful and empowering ways. This contributes to ongoing marginalization based on race, ethnicity, class, language, and immigrant status. In our work with various school districts, we encourage educators to shift their thinking from what families might need to how they, themselves, can lead. In the article, we provide examples of how to host literacy days in families’ languages, what we learned, and how to work with parents as partners in developing school-wide events.

We conclude: Too often, schools view home languages and cultures as deficits, with families merely receiving information and services.  If families and classroom teachers are at the center of family engagement, they will be leaders and agents, and together we can transform our English-only and monolingual spaces to multilingual, culturally sustaining ones.

 This article originally appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of Literacy Today, the member magazine of the International Literacy Association.

What’s Dual Language Education?

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What’s a dual language (DL) program and how can you start one? This is a serious question across the United States (and world), as more and more schools are recognizing the value in preserving families’ home languages and working toward bilingualism for all students. There are many models, though a good majority of DL bilingual education programs in the U.S. mix students from two language backgrounds (for example, English and Spanish). By providing content instruction in students’ languages, DL programs develop students’ bilingualism, biliteracy, high academic achievement and cultural competencies. While it’s difficult work (see my earlier posts), we know a lot about how to create equitable programs. At a recent conference sponsored by Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, I devised a workshop focused on how to build a dual language program and simultaneously enhance equity for transnational students designated as English Learners. Here are my slides from that workshop – happy planning! Whats a DL Program 2019