AfroLatinidad in Dual Language Bilingual Education: An Exploration into Borderlands, Blanqueamiento, and Resistance

Dorsa Fahami

My dissertation explores how raciolinguistic ideologies are taken up by teachers in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) and how these ideologies intersect with teachers' conceptualizations of AfroLatinidad. Throughout this study, I engage in critical autoethnographic and ethnographic provocations and explore the theoretical contributions of raciolinguistics, Nepantla, and Antiracist Black Language Pedagogies. I explore how the adults of one 2nd/3rd-grade dual language classroom, over the period of one school year, make meaning of the ideologies, practices, and discourses prevalent in DLBE spaces related to AfroLatinidad, identity construction, and bilingual development. I examine how both ethnic/national-state knowledge and racialized experiences shaped teachers' (re)presentation of AfroLatinidad, and how engaging in this level of nuanced racial literacy work with students proved to be more difficult. Instead, with students, I observed teachers perpetuating false notions that Latinidad is a biological racial categorization, delineating its boundaries by language and phenotype, a conceptualization which I problematize. I also make evident how, despite the discourses and ideologies prevalent within the school that perpetuated dominant processes of Latine racialization and harmful raciolinguistic ideologies, teachers continued to engage in processes to make the oppressive nature of this rhetoric visible. I highlight how the participants employ refusal (Carter Jackson, 2024) as a remedy for deficit-based raciolinguistic ideologies, which supported them in their efforts to create a transformative DLBE ecosystem that centers the joy, brilliance, and humanity of AfroLatine emergent bilinguals. To support the field in moving toward liberatory bilingual schooling, I propose the theorization: An Antiracist Latinidad/es Linguistic Pedagogy.

About Dorsa Fahami

Dorsa Fahami is an experienced bilingual teacher, school leader, lifelong learner, and proud daughter of Mexican and Iranian immigrants. She has experience as a teacher and a dean of instruction in a variety of dual language program models, including one-way late-exit, 90-10 two-way dual language, and ENL across public, private, and charter schools. Her passion for bilingual education has led her to work in Texas, Chile, Mexico, and, most recently, New York City. Dorsa is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum and Teaching Department at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research primarily addresses issues related to the intersections of biliteracy, language acquisition, and identity development, considering the impact of ideologies regarding race, ethnicity, language, (dis)ability, and gender on pedagogical practice and student learning. A more emergent line of inquiry within her work considers how we can foster students' and teachers' abilities to critically analyze educational literacy-based technologies, showcasing the potential of a sociotechnological pedagogy that places Students of Color and emergent bilinguals at the center of resisting algorithmic oppression and voicing alternative techno-political solutions.