Thinking About Language In All The Right Places: A Critical Ethnography Of Bilingualism In Non-Classroom Spaces

Abstract

This critical ethnography examines how the language ideologies of non-teaching staff (NTS) shape language practices in a bilingual PreK-8 school. Recent research on two-way bilingual education reveals the ways that the language ideologies of teachers, administrators, and parents can support the privileging of English in bilingual programs by prioritizing the values and needs of English-dominant students and families over those of language-minoritized students and families. This study shifts the focus to another inner layer of the policy onion, the NTS who comprise half of school staff. Non-teaching staff interact with students, families, and other staff in the hallways, cafeteria, playground, front desk, and other non-instructional areas of the school site, and they too are policy agents who impact language uses and school culture. The findings of this study reveal that (1) NTS make the entire school site at El Sol a bilingual and bicultural space; (2) NTS model the ways that bilingualism is process, not outcome; (3) NTS come to work at El Sol because they want to give back to their community by sharing their own linguistic and cultural lived experience; (4) the actions of NTS at El Sol are the action of educators who work to carry out the mission and vision of the school; and (5) NTS resist the privileging of English at El Sol, yet there exist still hierarchies of Spanish. Non-teaching staff protect the school from mission drift by challenging English dominance and transforming non-instructional spaces into sites of bilingualism and biculturalism.