Imagining Self: Diversity of Bilingual Identity Among Students of an Enrichment

In any language education program, there are both commonalities and divergences in the ways in which students negotiate and form their identities. While work on bilingual education has revealed important similarities that students come to share, fewer studies have focused on explaining variation. In this paper, we explore individual differences by considering the unique sets of discourses and everyday lived experiences that surround 3 students at a bilingual Mandarin Chinese–English school. We offer implications for designing a reflective pedagogy that capitalizes on individual students’ understandings and interpretations of the bilingual self, language, culture, and race.