Abstract
From perspectives ranging from “No hay malas escuelas” to “If they didn’t have to go, I wouldn’t send them,” four, working class, multilingual, Latinx immigrant families share their beliefs and experiences in navigating public schooling and related institutional authorities in the Nuevo South - places in the US South, such as Northwest Arkansas, which have relatively new and burgeoning Latinx populations. The Northwest region of Arkansas, with its rapid demographic shifts, offers rich opportunities for examining Latinx immigrant family language practices and perspectives of education in spaces which until recently had been predominantly Anglo American and monolingual. With attention to language and identity, this paper presents findings from intensive, ethnographic fieldwork that examines how locally situated Latinx immigrant families think about language use in the home and at school, their perceptions of the ways in which the schools value and support (or silence) their children’s home language(s) and culture(s), and the degree to which these factors are perceived to influence their children’s academic engagement and achievement. Four vignettes from this study illustrate how economically and socio-politically marginalized families contend with a lack of cultural capital as they navigate the challenges of learning through a second language, student disengagement, and learning differences in Anglo American hegemonic institutions. Stories of confrontation, deception, ambivalence, and conformism reveal the varied sensibilities and approaches that US Latinx immigrant families adopt to support the needs of their children in school contexts and their varying degrees of success.
Presenters
Cindy RauthStudent, Doctoral Candidate, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Education and Learning Worlds of Differences
KEYWORDS
Education, Language and Identity, Multilingualism, US Latinx, Immigrants, Nuevo South
