Search

This year's corecipients of the Outstanding Elementary Educators in the English Language Arts Award are Jill Hermann-Wilmarth and Caitlin L. Ryan for their critical work to support educators on how [...]

This systematic review includes 125 peer-reviewed education-research articles that employ a LatCrit framework (from a search including articles published from 1995 to 2020). The author examines how the literature utilizes LatCrit and advances ideas about race, Latinxs, and Latinidad in education. The author presents significant patterns and divergences in the literature’s strengths, challenges, and tensions. Some strengths include detailing Latinxs’ experiences and valuing experiential knowledge. The author problematizes four research practices: (1) describing LatCrit with select tenets of CRT; (2) not defining race or other relevant concepts (language, culture, etc.); (3) claiming Latinxs are unique because of their multidimensionality; and (4) exceeding LatCrit’s scope by rationalizing the study’s use of LatCrit because its participants are Latinxs. The author argues that these complications lead to a paradox: even though LatCrit emerges from critical race theory and is described as for Latinxs, the literature largely undertheorizes race and lacks clarity about conceptualizing Latinxs as a racialized group. The author recommends four framing ideas that are particular to LatCrit and that help advance the specificity of Latinidad in education.

Offering a raciolinguistic and racial realist perspective, this theoretical article critiques using dual-language bilingual education (DL) as a strategy to provide youth, particularly "English-language learners," the elusive goal of a bilingual and racially integrated education. The author argues this racial desegregation approach -- through its assumption that White students will be the English-language models -- impedes DL's potential to provide equity to Latinxs and other students. The author contends this integration strategy inadvertently perpetuates racist ideologies about racialized youths' bilingualism, White mainstream English's superiority, and majority-Latinx bilingual education. Furthermore, the strategy tethers justice for Latinxs to Whites' interest in DL, consequently perpetuating material inequities.

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.

"Racial literacy" has contributed powerful advances in multiple disciplines about how race and racism are understood. Many education scholars use the concept to refer to antiracist practices and ideologies, a definition that casts some people as either racially literate or illiterate. In this essay the author draws on examples from education literature to argue that this interdisciplinary conceptual norm hinders scholars' attempts to reveal the dominance of race-evasiveness, however unintentionally, for two reasons. First, describing people as racially literate or illiterate implies that those who adopt race-evasive or racist ideologies are not interpreting racial ideas, which overlooks that all people who live in a racist society engage in literacy practices that make meaning of race. Second, construing racial literacy strictly as antiracist obscures that making meaning of race can be done through hegemonic ideologies. This accepted conceptualization may stymie useful analyses of hegemonic ideologies that predominate in U.S. society and schools. The author presents a "continuum of racial literacies" to differentiate between "hegemonic" and "counterhegemonic racial literacies." The continuum's exposure of "hegemonic racial literacies" encourages scholars to capture the hidden ideologies in literacy practices that may not exhibit an explicit racial focus but nevertheless perpetuate racism. Furthermore, the author suggests eschewing the labels "racially illiterate" and "racially literate" and instead affirms that people become racially literate through both racist and antiracist literacy practices. Instead of "racially illiterate" or "literate," the author submits "consciousness" as a more apt term and connects the continuum's counterhegemonic end to developing "critical-racial consciousness," an antiracist lens.

Background/Context: Bi/multilingual students' STEM learning is better supported when educators leverage their language and cultural practices as resources, but STEM subject divisions have been historically constructed based on oppressive, dominant values and exclude the ways of knowing of nondominant groups. Truly promoting equity requires expanding and transforming STEM disciplines. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article contributes to efforts to illuminate emergent bi/multilingual students' ways of knowing, languaging, and doing in STEM. We follow the development of syncretic literacies in relation to translanguaging practices, asking, How do knowledges and practices from different communities get combined and reorganized by students and teachers in service of new modeling practices? Setting and Participants: We focus on a seventh-grade science classroom, deliberately designed to support syncretic literacies and translanguaging practices, where computer science concepts were infused into the curriculum through modeling activities. The majority of the students in the bilingual program had arrived in the United States at most three years before enrolling, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Research Design: We analyze one lesson that was part of a larger research-practice partnership focused on teaching computer science through leveraging translanguaging practices and syncretic literacies. The lesson was a modeling and computing activity codesigned by the teacher and two researchers about post-Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Analysis used microethnographic methods to trace how students assembled translanguaging, social, and schooled practices to make sense of and construct models. Findings/Results: Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing and negotiating both designed and emergent goals. These included sensemaking, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting both the physical and computational models of migration. Conclusions/Recommendations: Implications support the development of theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students to engage in meaning-making through translanguaging and syncretic practices in order to provide new possibilities for lifting up STEM learning that may include, but is not constrained by, disciplinary learning. Additional implications for teacher education and student assessment practices call for reconceptualizing schooling beyond day-to-day curriculum as part of making an ontological shift away from prioritizing math, science, and CS disciplinary and language objectives as defined by and for schooling, and toward celebrating, supporting, and centering students' diverse, syncretic knowledges and knowledge use.

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals' multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to examine the ideologies that circulate through assessment. By comparing interview data from English as a new language and dual-language bilingual teachers, we found that while reading assessments fail to capture the complexity of all emergent bilinguals' reading abilities, they particularly marginalize emergent bilinguals of color. Thus, we expose the myths of neutrality and validity around reading assessment and demonstrate how they are linked to ideologies about race and language. We offer a critical translingual approach to professional learning that encourages teachers to grapple with these ideologies and shift toward a more critical implementation of reading assessments.

This critical race ethnography examines a secondary-level dual-language (DL) program, a bilingual-education model thought to provide Latinxs educational equity. Drawing from a three-stage recursive analytic approach, I present evidence that a DL program's policies and practices valued offering Latinx youth biliterate schooling only so long as DL was available and advantageous to Whites--which ultimately excluded some Latinx students from bilingual education and/or accessing its benefits. I theorize DL functions as white property when DL perpetuates racial hierarchies and preserves the value of a white racial identity, thereby maintaining Whites' inequitable material accumulation. I problematize the logic of DL--highlighting that DL has the elitist tendencies of world-language education--and assess DL's potential to deliver educational justice to Latinxs.