Racist and Raciolinguistic Teacher Ideologies: When Bilingual Education is “Inherently Culturally Relevant” for Latinxs

Many schools attempt to address the needs of “English-language learners,” who usually are Spanish-dominant Latinxs, by offering dual-language (DL) bilingual education. While undertaking a larger ethnographic study of one such secondary-level dual-language program, I examined how dual-language teachers understood the program as equitable for Latinxs. I found that teachers believed DL met Latinxs’ needs by providing Spanish-language/biliteracy schooling, which deemphasized the need for explicitly enhancing youths’ critical consciousness. This teacher ideology of assuming DL is “inherently culturally relevant” led to significant issues. For example, teachers believed DL would improve Latinxs’ academic achievement, but when teachers perceived Latinx achievement was not on par with White dual-language students’ outcomes, teachers made sense of Latinxs’ underperformance in DL through racist explanations and did not interrogate the program’s cultural relevance. Specifically, teachers pointed to the program not providing Latinxs the needed Spanish input even though the Latinx students self-identified as bilingual and were the “Spanish-dominant” students, and teachers pointed to Latinxs’ cultural and familial deficits. I argue teachers overlooked critical-racial consciousness as an important component of an equitable education. Implications include for teachers to cultivate their critical-racial consciousness, interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies, and define an equitable DL as centering critical-racial consciousness.

Story Shaping Ideology

Using interviews, artifacts, email correspondences, and lesson plans collected from six white, female, preservice teachers during their student teaching, this chapter focuses on the stories that shaped their ideologies of the emergent bilingual children in their classrooms. The findings indicate the preservice teachers, while having diverse lived experiences, held some common majoritarian stories concerning English learners. In addition to those majoritarian stories already established in the field, there were three additional stories uncovered in this study that significantly influenced the ideologies of emergent bilingual students. The chapter concludes by encouraging teacher educators to unpack story and use it as a vehicle for addressing teacher ideology of emergent bilingual students.