Remembering her youth in Douglas, Arizona, conveniently located across from its Mexican sister city of Agua Prieta, Sonora, Laura C. Chávez-Moreno wishes she had had the opportunity to participate in bilingual education classes.
She has had many opportunities since then, including as a researcher who spent years attending classes and interviewing students and teachers who were part of a dual language program in the Midwest.
It was structured in what some might consider the optimal way to teach the language. Beginning in elementary school, approximately half of the students in the program would be native Spanish speakers and the other half would be native English speakers. They would all come together as they learned to speak, read, and write in both languages, and would graduate bilingual, a necessity for children whose first language was Spanish and a precious opportunity for children whose first language was English.
During her visit to the district's schools, Chávez-Moreno was interested in seeing how the program was providing a culturally relevant education to the Latino students who made up the native Spanish speakers; After all, he says, the dual language model has its roots in the The impulse of the Chicano movement for bilingual education. Chávez-Moreno is an assistant professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicano and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But he also saw contradictions, such as how students seemed almost bored with the program's lessons on race and equality when they were in high school. Or how its structure got in the way of Latino students getting the coveted “biliteracy” endorsement on their diplomas, while non-Latino white students apparently achieved it without problems.
The program shows how schools play a role in reinforcing disparities between racial groups, Chávez-Moreno argues in his recent book, “How schools create race: teaching Latino racialization in the United States.”
EdSurge spoke with Chávez-Moreno about why he thinks it's important for educators to take a critical look at how programs aimed at helping Latino students, even with the best intentions, can fall short, and what it will take to correct course. (Chávez-Moreno used the term “Latinx” instead of “Latino” throughout the interview.)
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: I thought the premise of your book, which includes some criticism of how dual language programs are operated, was interesting, because they are generally talked about as the gold standard in language education, especially in comparison to English. more typical as a second language. programs.
Laura Chávez-Moreno: The reason it (English as a second language) is called subtractive is because it subtracts the student's first language to simply replace it with English. That has been the most traditional way to address this “problem” of having students in our classrooms who do not speak English.
So the reason communities really use bilingual education to counteract this is because these programs are what are called additive programs. They want you to learn English because we are in the United States and that is the dominant language. But they also want you to keep the language you grew up with, the language your family speaks, etc.
That's why bilingual education programs are really the best type of programs that students can receive in schools. In fact, my studies were in Arizona and, as a student, I did not have the option of a bilingual education. I wish I had done it.
It's something that communities really have to fight for and so there has to be this kind of narrative that they're really good for the students, right? Like idolize them, or like you mentioned before, put them as a gold standard, and they really are.
The problem is that there has also been this disconnection of bilingual education from the roots of ethnic studies. The Chicano movement also called for, for example, bilingual education, and then this radical racial idea that students should be affirmed in terms of their cultures and their families and so on.
The problem is that bilingual education is sometimes thought of as simply a language education program, where they actually only teach Spanish, for example, or they actually only teach English, or, for example, sometimes even as, 'Oh well, they're also teaching about culture and trying to make sure they affirm different cultures.'
But that doesn't mean it doesn't even go far enough, I maintain in the book.
I think we talk about race as something that defines the external society, and then schools serve students regardless of their race or background; It's something that happens outside the school walls. How do schools participate in defining race or racial groups?
Schools create race because race is not something simply inherent in society. So how does our society (race) do? It does this through our institutions, and schools are really important institutions in our society. So schools contribute to generating ideas about what race is and what racialized groups are in our society.
Why does it matter how we look at the Latinx group? Is it an ethnicity or a race? That is also an important question. One of the things I argue in the book and in other works is that it matters because it shows us how we think about the concept of race itself. And sometimes we think of it as if it were an inherent category in our society rather than a social construct.
The way we think about the Latinx group, and how it relates to the concept of race, also tells us how we think about the process of creating racial categories.
All of this is important for two things: It's important because we need to disrupt ideas that race is an inherent category in our society. Why do certain groups, for example, experience certain material conditions differently from others, and why are they not given the resources they need now or historically?
So it's also important in terms of the Latinx group itself, because students are interested in this question. Students had questions and noticed some contradictions. One of the things I think good educators should do is follow students' questions about how our society works and what is happening in it.
You write about professors who had conversations about what defines race and noted that they were limited to physical characteristics. Latinos were also thought to be immigrants, rather than including students who were born here. Are there any examples that stand out to you about how schools played a role in defining race or ethnicity?
One of the things that I noticed throughout the program is that there were some individual teachers who took it on themselves, who were really self-initiated and were able to teach about race in their classrooms.
But it was also really surprising that, unfortunately, sometimes it was just individual teachers doing that kind of work rather than structuring it throughout the program. It was the case that, for example, students continued to learn about racist stories, but nothing was actually taught about race itself as a construct.
In one case, you write about a teacher who called black students in the dual language program “the cream of the crop” and felt that created a divide among those students.
A racial category exists because it is put in relation to or in comparison with others. There have to be others with whom they also relate or compare themselves.
It's important to talk about that because, on the one hand, that's how race is created, in terms of distributing resources differently to different racialized groups. But then also the discourse of how these groups are talked about and formed and separated through discourses. In terms of the idea of how the Latinx group was formed, I noticed that it really pointed a lot towards Latin America more than, for example, examining the experiences of people here in the United States.
I think one of the reasons this was done is simply because of the lack of Spanish-language materials from the Latino community here in the US in terms of their history. The history of the Chicano movement is mostly in English.
In the program you were watching, it was surprising to read that the test for native Spanish speakers to demonstrate their fluency in English was more difficult than the test for English speakers to demonstrate their fluency in Spanish. And that students whose native language was Spanish did not obtain as good academic results as those who entered the program as English speakers.
This is how race is done in the U.S. It means distributing this resource differently to students, because in the end the racial distribution of who was able to obtain the necessary scores was very determined along racial lines.
In terms of academic outcomes, we know that there are still many things that need to be done in education and in communities for students who have traditionally been underserved by schools to improve their academic outcomes. We know that really that's not just school. It is also part of the community or city and state and higher levels.
When we still follow this logic of schools that are based on misconceptions of what intelligence is, for example, and then measure people based on that, it makes sense that academic outcomes continue to be different. The same ways that have traditionally been applied are still being applied to show that a specific community is not doing so well.
It is also the case that currently the measures used to evaluate academic achievement are actually designed and designed in a way that maintains the dominance of certain communities.
In your opinion, do schools or teachers see themselves as playing a role in this kind of critical thinking about race and how they shape it? Especially given that you watched this show during Trump's first presidential term, which was a time of much racial upheaval, and it was released as we approach his second.
I was in the schools that week when Trump won the first election and it was devastating. But there were a lot of teachers who talked to students about it and helped them process, answered questions and said, “I don't know.” Sometimes just being able to discuss things and validate people's feelings and fears is a good thing teachers can do.
One of the teachers I really admired shared with me something that I added at the end of the book. When I was a young teacher, I was very afraid of doing things that I didn't really know the answers to or what it was going to be like.
And she said that now that she was a more experienced teacher, that she had more experience, she recognized that it was okay for her to say, 'You know, I don't know,' and then learn together with the students, and by asking them to explore together something about which the students had questions.
I think that's something that teachers need support with and feel confident in. That's really the best way for teachers to get involved in teaching.
