Equity and Dual Language Immersion: Curriculum

Summary

This paper considers questions of equity in the area of Curriculum in two-way dual language bilingual education (TWBE). TWBE programs are a specific and popular model of enrichment bilingual education in the United States that enrolls approximately equal numbers of students identified as dominant in English and in a target language (usually Spanish). [1] In these programs, children learn language through content and they learn content through both program languages. Programs follow structured language allocation policies, with various mechanisms for separating instruction in each language: some divide languages by teacher, or time of day, or content area, or day of the week. According to the most recent “Guiding Principles” for TWDL education produced by the Center for Applied Linguistics, TWDL programs share three program goals: “grade level academic achievement,” “bilingualism and biliteracy,” and “sociocultural competence” (Howard, et al., 2018)

Before beginning this exploration, the paper also needs to define curriculum. Dr. Noah DeLissovoy, of the University of Texas at Austin, is strongly situated in this area and thinks of curriculum as:

The various ways in which knowledge is framed, becomes present, and is deployed in schools, as well as the ways in which basic orientations are formed and reproduced. (DeLissovoy, email correspondence, October 2018)

This definition suits this paper's exploration, which is concerned here with how we decide what knowledge is important, how we bring our students to become aware of important knowledge, and how our decisions around knowledge are shaped by our own (or others’) sometimes unspoken ideologies. To put it plainly, this paper explores the ways in which both “what we teach” and “how we teach” in a TWBE classroom need to change in order to be more equitable, and about the orientations or ideologies that underlie decisions related to what or how we teach.

[1] Because most of the TWDL programs in the US are Spanish/English programs, and because these are the programs the author has spent her career working within, at times in this paper she will refer to Spanish as the target language of TWDL programs; at the same time, she recognizes that TWDL programs exist in a wide range of languages.