Identity, Community and Power in Bilingual Education
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IDENTITY, COMMUNITY AND POWER IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Bilingual education is about much more than language. Identity and power relationships figure prominently, although the dynamics of these relationships vary across contexts. Bilingual education planners, policymakers, and practitioners have choices in how they respond to the kinds of language education challenges they face in their school, community, and society contexts. The choices they make about language education policies, programs, and practices reflect ideological assumptions about languages, speakers of languages, and the role of schools in society. These choices can have important implications for students, their families, and the communities and societies in which they live. Student identities are constantly being negotiated and shaped within all forms of schooling. Within bilingual education this negotiation takes place in two or more languages and reflects the material and symbolic resources of the different social groups. Bilingual education researchers investigate and document how power relations among local and global communities influence the forms of bilingual education that are implemented and the teacher–student interactions that occur within particular bilingual programs. Practitioners use their understanding of power relationships between social identity groups in their communities to develop bilingual education policies, programs, and practices that may elevate the status of minority languages and speakers of those languages, provide more access to opportunities for language minority students, and challenge dominant identity and power relations on the local level. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Sociolinguistic research conducted in the 1960s, 70s and 80s contributes to our understanding of societal multilingualism, language planning, and the social reproduction of the status of minority language students through schooling. This research provides an important foundation for those concerned with the relationships between identity, community, and power in bilingual education. J. Cummins and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 5: Bilingual Education, 77–89. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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REBECCA FREEMAN FIELD
Early sociology of language research demonstrates that language use in multilingual societies is never neutral. The historical, social, political, and economic circumstances leading to a particular multilingual situation (e.g., migration, imperialism, federation, border-area phenomena, globalization) influence relations between the different linguistic groups in that context, which in turn influence the ways that languages are used and evaluated by speakers of those languages (see Fasold, 1984 for review of this literature). Haugen (1972) introduced the notion of language ecology to focus attention on the interactions between language and its environment, including how the language interacts with other languages socially as a medium of communication and psycholog
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