Holly Link

This article investigates children's elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals-the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds high-stakes testing. We describe how practices that focus heavily on testing mold children into autonomous, rational individuals while marginalizing those who don't fit this model. Adhering to these practices and naturalizing the Enlightenment subject limits educators' ability to serve students who resist the normative practices of schooling. HOLLY LINK, PhD, is director of educational programming and research at Revolución. Link is also an educational consultant in the fields of English as a Second Language and dual-language education. At Revolución Arte, she is developing a participatory research center for young people and adults from Latinx immigrant backgrounds through which they can promote social transformation and inform public policy. SARAH GALLO, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Her research draws on ethnographic and linguistic anthropological tools to promote school-based learning that better recognizes and builds on young children's mobile and heterogeneous resources in the United States and Mexico. STANTON E. F. WORTHAM, PhD, is the Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education of Boston College. A linguistic anthropologist with expertise in how identities develop in human interactions, Wortham has conducted research spanning education, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than 80 articles and chapters that cover a range of topics, including linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, ''learning identity'' (how social identification and academic learning interconnect), and Mexican immigration to the United States.

Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican-immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the 2 schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students’ own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students.

This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nation. Although the concept of language ideology often assumes stable macrolevel beliefs, our data indicate that ideologies can vary dramatically in one town. Elementary educators and students had a positive, “bilinguals-in-the-making” ideology about Spanish-speaking students, while secondary educators used more familiar deficit accounts. Despite their differences, we argue that both settings tended toward subtractive schooling, and we offer suggestions for how educators could more effectively build upon emergent bilinguals’ language skills and practices.

Drawing primarily on interview data from a 5-year ethnography on the school experiences of Mexican immigrant children in a New Latino Diaspora community, we explore how their teachers understood and responded to increasing deportation-based immigration practices affecting children’s lives. We illustrate how teachers fell along a continuum regarding their desire and success in pushing beyond their comfort zones to create spaces in which they learned from, and built upon, students’ immigration experiences. We argue for teacher education that prepares educators to become border crossers who engage with aspects of difference, such as immigration status, that are rarely discussed in schools.

In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw upon a five-year ethnography on Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teachers, and families in a Pennsylvania town navigate learning within a context of unprecedented deportations. Gallo and Link focus on the experiences and perspectives of one student, his teachers, and his parents, to explore how his father’s detainment and potential deportation affected his life and learning across educational contexts such as home, school, and alternative educational spaces. Through attention to the ways that this student effectively developed and deployed his knowledge of immigration outside of his classroom spaces, we explore the possibilities and tensions of creating safe spaces for students to draw upon immigration experiences for learning in school. Rather than maintaining silence around issues of difference like immigration, we call for educational practices and policies that would better prepare educators to recognize and respond to what we term students’ politicized funds of knowledge, or the real-world experiences, knowledges and skills that young people deploy and develop across contexts of learning that are often positioned as taboo or unsafe to incorporate into classroom learning.

As US classrooms approach a decade of response to No Child Left Behind, many questions and concerns remain around the education of those labeled as English language learners, in mainstream, English as a Second Language, and bilingual education classrooms. A national policy context where standardized tests dominate curriculum and instruction, and first language literacy is discouraged and undervalued, poses unusual challenges for learners whose communicative repertoires encompass translanguaging practices. Drawing on ethnographic data from two different educational contexts, we argue via a continua of biliteracy lens that the welcoming of translanguaging in classrooms is not only necessary, but desirable educational practice. We suggest that Obama's current policies, on the one hand, and our schools' glaring needs, on the other, offer new spaces to be exploited for innovative programs, curricula, and practices that recognize, value, and build on the communicative repertoires and translanguaging practices of students, their families, and communities.

This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nation. Although the concept of language ideology often assumes stable macrolevel beliefs, our data indicate that ideologies can vary dramatically in one town. Elementary educators and students had a positive, “bilinguals-in-the-making” ideology about Spanish-speaking students, while secondary educators used more familiar deficit accounts. Despite their differences, we argue that both settings tended toward subtractive schooling, and we offer suggestions for how educators could more effectively build upon emergent bilinguals’ language skills and practices.

Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican-immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the 2 schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students’ own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students.

Many schools across the US have experienced rapid increases in Spanish-speaking students over the past decade.  These schools, along with media and policymakers, attend closely to whether and how well Spanish speakers are learning English, but they pay little attention to how English-speaking students respond to the increasing prevalence of Spanish. Drawing on ethnographic research in one American elementary school, we investigate how a group of young English-speaking students react to the increasing presence of Spanish in their school and community. We draw on Rampton’s (1995, 2006) notions of language crossing and stylization, exploring how English-speaking students employ stylization or crossing by adopting Spanish phonology and lexis. We also investigate how these practices allow children to inhabit and evaluate certain identities while serving a variety of interactional functions.
We describe crossing and stylization practices that run counter to familiar hegemonic language ideologies in which English is the language of status and power. These practices do not remove the dominant status of English in the school, but they do expose interesting counterhegemonic action. We focus on how students from English-speaking backgrounds use basic Spanish words and phrases, speaking what we refer to as “faux Spanish,” as they imitate their Spanish-speaking peers, participate in interaction rituals, seek attention, and playfully mock their peers. We also examine instances in which students from English-speaking backgrounds talk about Spanish and claim knowledge or inheritance of Mexican identity and culture. We describe how these instances show children making sense of difference, and we argue that they also show children assigning value and high status to language practices and social identities often marginalized in school settings. Our findings suggest that, regardless of the Standard English variety taught and required for academic endeavors at school, children are busy expanding their linguistic repertoires, playing with positioning and footing, and laying claim to and negotiating multiple social identities. We argue that attention to these processes may help educators see them as resources for learning that can inform practice.

References
Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. New York, NY: Longman.

Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.