Transcript Bringing the Mountain to Mohammed: - UPR-RP

“They Don’t Speak English”
Interrogating racist ideologies and perceptions
of school personnel in a Midwestern state
Gerardo R. López, Ph.D.
Vanessa A. Vazquez, M.A.
Indiana University
Demographic Overview
• Indiana has witnessed a healthy growth in the
number of Latina/o workers– particularly in the
last 20 years.
• According to the US Census, the Hispanic
population in Indiana grew from 87,047 in 1980 to
214,536 in 2000 (estimated 242,518 people in
2004)
• The majority of these individuals (71%) are of
Mexican decent.
What are the challenges for schools?
• Home factors
•
•
•
•
•
Language
Tenuous immigration status
Low levels of prior schooling
Health/immunization issues
Identity issues
• School factors
• Inadequate knowledge of Latina/o culture
• Inadequate knowledge of ESL/Bilingual Education
approaches
• Insufficient resources to address needs
• Student placement issues
Background of Study
•
Emerged from a larger study of Latina/o parents
and how they understood and interpreted
“involvement.”
•
Interviewed teachers, administrators, and other
school personnel about the challenges they face
when working with the Latina/o community
•
Quickly realized that school personnel held
particular beliefs about Latina/o families; beliefs
that were “noble” and/or “righteous” on the surface,
but emerged from a deeper racialized logic about
language and culture
Speaking in Code
• “Things are different now…”
• References to a mythologized past
• “Proxies” for the Latina/o community
•
•
•
•
Mobility
Low SES
Single Parents
Larger Class Sizes
• Researchers needed to decipher the codes that
school personnel were speaking
Method
• Qualitative Research
• Three Latina/o-impacted districts:
• Small Midwestern school district (student population= 10,665)
• Rural school district (Student population= 6, 571)
• Large Urban District (Student population=38,931)
• Schools
• High Schools: N=4
• Middle Schools: N=2
• Elementary Schools: N= 3
• Semi-structured interviews
• Teachers: N=14
• Administrators: N=8
• School Personnel: N=6
• Observations, interviews, group interviews, onthe-spot interviews, fieldnotes
Initial Findings
• Language as barrier
• Needs specialists become “experts”
• Construction of parents, especially Latina/o
parents as “good” and “bad”
Language as barrier
• I: [With] regards to your Latino students…do you see parents being
involved?
• T: [W]e are working on getting the parents to help more at home because to
this child we’re saying “you need to practice this or you need to practice that”
or we’ll send things home, and [get no response]. I did have a conference with
a Latino dad. Dad came to conference, mom didn’t come. I think because of
work. But, the student [would] say: “My mom don’t know English, my mom
don’t know English. My mom can’t help me, my mom don’t know English.”
•
• I: Is all the work in English?
• T: Well…yeah, the things she needs to learn are. I mean she needs to learn her
shapes in English and her letters in English, and those things. But she has an
older brother and dad who speaks in English. So there’s probably some way to
work it out, you know. But we are probably going to have to meet with them or
handle it differently, or you know, something like that. But it’s been really
interesting to watch the families. You know, each work it out the best they can.
And, and they do show interest, they do care, But they are things that slip
through the crack because I don’t speak Spanish. I cannot begin to write my
newsletter in Spanish. And I wish I could. I wish I spoke Spanish. I wish I
could translate everything because it would simplify things a lot. But, that’s
just not realistic.
Needs specialist become experts
• I: Tell me about those recess problems.
• T: fights, lots of fights. And kicking and just, I mean, you know, blows. And we
had just never allowed fighting in our playground or anything like that. And
they [Latinas/os] really felt like if somebody just barely brushed up against
them or something like that, you got in their space and they felt like they
wanted to solve it right there. We had a lot of fights.
• I: Was there kind of a trend?
• T: It wasn’t. It was, in a sense. It was not racial. It was more of just, I just think
that Hispanic children have always been taught to stand up for yourself and if
somebody doesn’t fight fair or whether it be soccer or whether it be coming
down the slide and they bump into you, then it’s not necessarily, you know, you
got in their space…But I just think, we did have a lot of fighting and that was
really mostly because the Hispanic children tended to stay together was really
among each other and not so much, you know, with white [children], you know
Hispanic children fighting back and forth.
• I: And what did you do as a school do to begin to address that?
• T: We brought well, again, language was a barrier, so we did bring, the ESL
teacher. She came out to recess duty for a while. And she work with them to
kind of establish, procedure again. Like if somebody does take something, or
bump into you, or you don’t think is playing fair, that you come and get the
teacher and let them help solve the problem. So she came out to recess and that
greatly helped. It also helped that she covered some of those things within her
class. Then I think to just how, it’s just how, that we have [dealt with it]...
Construction of “good” & “bad” parents
•
•
•
•
•
•
I: How does [your school], build opportunities for parent involvement?
T: …I’m not sure if we have like a lot of parents, or you know where parents can come. I
know a lot of schools will do like reading nights or math nights or anything like that, but
we’ve not really done anything like that. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that
we’re thinking “are we wasting our time? Are parents going to come?” Because in the
past they haven’t.
I: What leads you to believe that the turn out won’t be good?
T: …Well we sent home slips of papers saying “this is the time that we would like to
schedule you, can you make it?” and a lot of time I won’t get those back! And you can try
calling parents, [but] there’s never a good time for them. So it’s, trying to work with two
different schedules you know. I think from teacher to teacher, you know [we
communicate], “these people, you know this family they usually don’t show.” And
sometimes you know the parents will show, but usually you kind of have an idea of who’s
not going to come and, and be a part of the conferences.
I: How do you think the school sees the role of the parent?
T: We hope that they’re making sure the homework is being done, that they’re eating
right, that they’re going to bed at a decent time , you know? I think that the mental image
of what a parent should be. And I think , that [with] the demographics we have here, a lot
of times we can’t see that. We know that’s not happening in everyone’s house…I think
knowing, just knowing, the parents are going to be supportive--that if there is a problem,
are the parents are going to be there to back their children to make sure they have loving
and nurturing environment to go home to? I think parents are, you know the most
important thing in the child’s life. And, you know, I think a lot of students here don’t go
home feeling that way.
Analysis & Discussion
•
Diffusion of responsibility
•
Language as “problem” or “barrier”
•
•
Kids have barrier not schools
Its not “their” problem
•
•
•
Pass buck to specialized school personnel
Certain things that are beyond a school’s control (e.g.,
economic factors, cultural factors, etc.)
When all else fails, blame parents
•
•
They can understand parents, but still blame them for
not getting involved (involvement=caring)
Parents need to do their “share”
Analysis & Discussion
Perception of neutrality
•
Educators & schools see themselves as neutral
•
•
•
Teachers/Administrators fail to recognize their own
social conditioning
•
•
“We value their language & culture” (but won’t do
anything to accommodate them)
“We’re doing what’s best for the child” (so we refer them
to the experts)
“Good old days” logic is still informing how they view
the present situation
Don’t recognize their own role as socializing agents
•
•
•
Don’t see themselves as reifying normative values/beliefs
Rather, they see it as their duty to educate kids and
parents into “proper” ways of being and acting in a
school setting
Reified missionary logic that they are imposing on
Latina/o parents and kids…
Conclusion
•
Problem is symptomatic of a much bigger illness
•
•
•
Paternalism over language is informed by those very same language rights
laws that inform the way we treat ELL’s kids:
• Lau v. Nichols
• Castaneda v. Pickard
• Title VI of CRA
Language of deficiency is embedded into “language rights” discourse
Breeds a false sense of neutrality
•
•
Judgments can never be neutral because the space in which they
are created/interpreted/applied is always already racialized.
That’s why need to focus on the politics of the everyday
•
The same ways in which laws are racialized, so too are schools and their
agents actively constructing racialized images of Latina/o students and
parents though their actions and positionality