"'But he speaks Spanish': English-Only Policies and Colonial Mechanization of Home Languages" & "Uncovering Miss Amanda: Reflecting on the Power of a Critical Feminist Researcher".
Miller, Amanda.
2015
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Abstract: This thesis is comprised of two articles. The first uncovers how English-Only policies in preschools perpetuate colonial understandings of language and citizenship. Constructing the use and value of students' home languages predominantly for disciplinary purposes, ethnographic research found that teachers embodied English-Only policies to produce the English Language Learner (ELL) as ... read more"Other". As witnesses to this knowledge production process, white, native English speaking students reproduced similar constructions of the ELL-Other through the mimicry of the teachers' disciplinary use of home languages. The school becomes a space that not only produces the ELL-Other, but also a space that continuously reifies the validity and endurance of the ELL student as Other in opposition to the native English speaking Self. As a site of colonial education, the preschool is where native English-speaking pre-citizen students and teachers employ a language made illegal by English-Only policies to define and deny citizenship to ELL students. The second article is an accompanying methodology piece. Through the self-reflective analysis of the researchers' various positionalities in the field, this article adds to feminist methodologies by complicating dominant understandings of power present throughout the field. During ethnographic research in a preschool classroom, I was "hailed" by teachers and students to perform "Miss Amanda" as teacher, complicating many ethics of feminist research, such as transparency and reciprocity. An interrogation of this process revealed that representation and narration of self is not solely in the hands of researcher, but implicated in relational constructions between various subjects located in larger systems of power. By extending power analysis from the researcher-participant relationship to larger systems of power, I suggest that feminist researchers have a more complete understanding of power within and outside of the field in order to work within the systems that feminist research tries to disrupt.
Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2015.
Submitted to the Dept. of Education.
Advisor: Sabina Vaught.
Committee: Calvin Gidney, and Brian Gravel.
Keywords: Education, English as a second language, and Early childhood education.read less - ID:
- 79408853b
- Component ID:
- tufts:21481
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
