Chris Chang-Bacon

Generation Interrupted: A Pandemic and a Precedent

March 3, 2021March 3, 2021 Chris Chang-Bacon

There’s no doubt that this has been a school year like no other. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted schooling across the globe. A variety of “distance learning” measures remain in place for an unforeseen future. And many worry about the long-term impacts these disruptions will have on students and their learning.

Still, it’s important to remember that, for many, schooling interruption is not a new phenomenon.

In the field of language education, there’s an acronym called “SIFE.” It stands for “Students with Interrupted Formal Education.” The SIFE label is most often applied to refugee students whose schooling was interrupted by political and economic instability in their home countries. Within the U.S., however, there are many additional causes of interrupted schooling, such as housing insecurity, punitive suspension, chronic health issues, and the school to prison pipeline. Although the SIFE label isn’t usually applied in these latter cases, research documents the many obstacles students face upon schooling reentry, regardless of what caused the interruption.

These studies also point to a systemic unpreparedness of many schools to accommodate even short-term schooling interruptions. This research reveals a system so predicated on “normalcy,” that it is unable to support even the relatively small percentage of students whose schooling is interrupted in a given year.

So what happens when that system encounters a pandemic?

We’re now seeing this system at its breaking point. And to be clear, it’s not the students, it’s not the teachers, and it’s not the families who are at fault. Instead, what this pandemic has revealed is a myopic view of schooling and the students who experience its interruption.

I wrote about these issues in a piece for Educational Researcher. In this piece, I make three arguments about interrupted schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Continue reading →

Education, ESL, K-12, Language

Whose Ideal (and Who’s Ideal)?

February 1, 2021August 3, 2021 Chris Chang-Bacon

A post summarizing my latest article in Teachers College Record.

As some readers will know, I did my dissertation on “monolingual ideologies” in education. The idea of “monolingualism” made sense to me at the time (and still does in many cases). I was writing about states that had “English-only education” policies, despite evidence of the many benefits of bilingual education. To me, this was best explained by a deep-seated English-only bias of “monolingualism” (and the racism/nationalism that so often goes along with it).

The more I’ve written about the idea, however, the notion that all of the linguistic discrimination going on in schools was driven by “monolingualism” started to feel incomplete. Don’t get me wrong, there are far too many contexts where overt language oppression still takes place. But in other contexts, it began to feel too simple to explain all of it as a bias toward (English) monolingualism.

The history of U.S. education is often written as a long march toward monolingualism. This is appropriate in most cases: Schools have far too often been places where students were (and are) forbidden to speak languages other than English and overtly taught that learning English was the only avenue toward professional success or proving their knowledge.

However, it turns out that U.S. education has always encouraged multilingualism for some while forbidding it for others. Take renowned polyglots like Ben Franklin who were lauded for their cosmopolitan multilingualism: These figures gained fame at the same time that U.S. policies were attempting to forbid indigenous populations and enslaved people from speaking languages other than English.

So I realized I had to start thinking and writing about this in more complex ways. I’m trying to think less along the lines of “monolingual” and more along the lines of which language practices become “idealized” (and for whom). I bring out these ideas in my recent article for Teachers College Record. I write that,

“In addition to monolingualism as a language ideology, I argue that there is much to gain from a related, but broader framework of idealized language ideologies. Monolingual language ideologies uphold one specific language practice as the norm (e.g., so-called standard English). On the other hand, a framework of idealized language ideologies highlights the malleability of these supposed norms—involving (1) a set of idealized language practices (2) mapped onto an idealized speaker (3) in relation to certain institutional interests or power dynamics (see Figure 1). This framework helps to explain the entrenchment of problematic language hierarchies, whether through restrictive monolingual language policies or within educational programs ostensibly geared toward bilingualism.”

This has been helping me to articulate more clearly the underlying racism and anti-immigrant bias that informs whose langue practices are idealized–whether it be in monolingual or bilingual educational spaces. My thoughts on this are still being shaped by by engaging with related work from linguists, educators, and linguistic anthropologists (see article for massive list of name-drops, but here are two on my bookshelf at the moment). I’m looking forward to writing with this idea of “idealized language ideologies” more to see if it can help me better sort through the entanglements of language, racism, and nationalism in language education. Hopefully the idea that language practices can be “idealized” in different ways, for different individuals, and in different contexts can also help to better expose the host of other problematic ideologies that are ever-present in educational contexts and in society more widely.

For those interested in the full article, you can find it here (or a here for those without access to the journal).

Chang-Bacon, C. K. (2021). Idealized language ideologies: The “new bilingualism” meets the “old” educational inequities. Teachers College Record. 123(1). https://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=23558

ESL, Language, Policy

Who’s being “Sheltered?”

March 10, 2020March 10, 2020 Chris Chang-Bacon

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In education, we have a popular method called “Sheltered English Immersion,” which is supposedly designed to “shelter” students who are still learning English in schools.

In my last few years of research, I’ve wondered who or what else is being “sheltered” through this approach. In my latest article, I propose four answers to this question.

1. We’re sheltering the monolingual pedagogies as the only way to teach a language.

2. We’re sheltering monolingual teachers from having to learn another language, placing the burden of change on the students instead.

3. We’re sheltering monolingual English-speaking students from having to grapple with the multilingual realities that will face them outside the walls of the school.

4. We’re sheltering monolingual policies and theories that promote all of the above as just the “norm.”

When I bring these issues up in academic circles, some wonder if the field had already “moved past” the monolingual/bilingual dichotomy. A good critique if you’re up on the latest theoretical scholarship, but less so if you spend time in U.S. classrooms where monolingual approaches still dominate. So, I dive deeper to ask “If the monolingual paradigm has largely been destabilized… what accounts for the recalcitrance of monolingual orientations in educational policy and practice?” (p. 2).

I believe the answer is that the four “shelters” above produce major advantages for the (largely white) population of monolingual, English-speakers in U.S. K-12 schools and beyond. Dive in to the article below if you’re interested (let me know if you can’t access the article). Glad to hear your thoughts!

Chang-Bacon, C. K. (2020). Who’s being ‘sheltered?’: How monolingual language ideologies are produced within education policy discourse and Sheltered English Immersion. Critical Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1720259

Literacy, Literature, Testing, Writing

Poetry, Power, and Political Precision

April 23, 2018 Chris Chang-Bacon

To wrap up #NationalPoetryMonth, I’m excited to share a piece I wrote with Audrey Friedman and Joelle Pedersen at Boston College called In Praise of Poetry: Toward Access and Power, published in the most recent issue of the Illinois English Bulletin.

We collected poems from 20 high-schoolers labeled as “failing” on state writing exams. As you’ll see in the piece, the poems were brilliant, so we had to ask:

“What accounts for this discrepancy in which such a powerful writer can be rendered powerless…. Is the issue truly the writer, or is the problem the very way we understand, value, and assess certain ways of writing and being?” (p. 8).

We discuss how standardized tests compel students to write, not in the forms that are most productive or relevant, but in the forms most easily measured. As we argue,

“The Common Core State Standards’ narrow focus on informational and argumentative writing widens the gap between the language of schooling and the language of life. These genres do not and cannot capture the full range of students’ experiences, identities, or language skills” (p. 15).
Continue reading “Poetry, Power, and Political Precision” →

Dialect, Politics, Race, Uncategorized

Shh – Don’t Say ‘Speak American’ (Out Loud)

October 20, 2017October 20, 2017 Chris Chang-Bacon

There was justified outcry this week when a New Jersey teacher reprimanded students for speaking Spanish in class. She demanded the students speak “American,” arguing that U.S. troops are “not fighting for your right to speak Spanish.”

The students staged a walk-out. There have been calls for the teacher to be censured and dismissed. These outcomes are necessary, but we must also recognize that the teacher’s rant accurately named aloud what most U.S. schools impose on students every day.

The vast majority of students in the U.S. are spoken to, taught, and assessed exclusively in English, regardless of whether English is the language through which they learn best. Whether these English-Only restrictions are actual policy, or simply monolingual inertia, students across the country are forced to “speak American” every day without anyone having to name it out loud. Continue reading “Shh – Don’t Say ‘Speak American’ (Out Loud)” →

Critical Pedagogy, Education, ESL, Literacy, Research, Uncategorized

Who Gets to be “Critical?”

September 14, 2017September 14, 2017 Chris Chang-Bacon

bb1 — Image: Burning the “Book of Sports,” 1643

This year continues to demonstrate the importance of reading the world through a critical lens. But who gets to be “critical?” Who gets access to critical approaches to literacy versus who gets timed reading tests?

Educators who use literacy to challenge the status quo often ground their work in critical literacies. This approach goes beyond reading and writing as mechanical skills, using literacy to critique power and inequity–what Paulo Freire called “reading the word and the world.”

But what does this mean when we ask students to read the word and the world in another language?

I took up this question in a recent article for the Journal of Literacy Research. In the journal’s latest issue, Literacy Research and the Radical Imagination, I wrote alongside a phenomenal group of authors working to “radically reimagine the ways in which research can reposition people and ideas to create new and more inviting spaces for literacy.” (JLR, p. 319).

No small task. Continue reading “Who Gets to be “Critical?”” →

Policy, Uncategorized, Vocabulary

Inventing Illegality

February 22, 2017February 22, 2017 Chris Chang-Bacon

A new week, a new round of policies that endanger more than than they assist.

Through the debates that will rightly follow Trump’s latest round of immigration directives, notice who chooses to employ the term illegal vs. undocumented. And if that distinction doesn’t yet set your ears aflame, here’s one of the many reasons it should.

Earlier this fall, Emmy Award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa explained that you can identify an individual as having broken a law, but “what you cannot do is to label the person illegal.” Hinojosa continued,

“The reason why I say this, is not because I learned it from some radical Latino or Latina studies professor when I was a college student. I learned it from Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust, who said, ‘You know what? The first thing they did was that they declared the Jews to be an illegal people.’ And that’s what we’re talking about at this point.” Continue reading “Inventing Illegality” →

Critical Pedagogy, Pop Culture, Testing, Vocabulary

Word of the Year 2016: ‘Post-Truth’

November 17, 2016November 17, 2016 Chris Chang-Bacon

Fittingly, and somewhat depressingly, Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016 is ‘post-truth.’

In a year of politics demonstrating that feelings count as facts, the Oxford Dictionary defined ‘post-truth’ as “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

In the wake of Brexit, as well as the the recent U.S. presidential election, according to the Casper Grathwohl of Oxford Dictionaries:

“It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse… Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.”

Some argue the fault lies in the way we curate our own ‘bubbles’ of news and social media. But I’d add that the foothold gained by ‘post-truth’ is directly linked to the way we have come to teach ‘reading’ in today’s schools. A particular consequence of standardized testing is a renewed emphasis on close reading—which prioritizes evaluating a text based on its own internal logic rather than reading critically in terms of context, authorship, and counter narratives. Want to fight post-truth? Educate. Refuse to accept or promote single story narratives that say there is only one lens through which to understand the world, events, or groups of people. Read. Really Read. Continue reading “Word of the Year 2016: ‘Post-Truth’” →

Conflict, International Education, Policy, Pop Culture

‘Refugee’ Revisited: Rio 2016

August 9, 2016August 9, 2016 Chris Chang-Bacon

The Olympics aspire to inspire. This year, nothing has captured that spirit more than the standing ovation received by the first Refugee Olympic team at the opening ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

One team member in particular, 18-year-old swimmer Yusra Mardini, captured the world’s attention through her story of having pushed a sinking dinghy to shore, saving 20 lives as she and her family fled Syria.

Through all the (indisputably worthy) praise for Mardini and the rest of the team, less energy has been invested in exploring the conditions that engineered such a team into existence.

International policies are accountable for forcing these athletes, and countless others, into refugee status. These policies were enacted by many of the same countries whose athletes paraded alongside the refugee team. The same culpability resides with transnational bodies such as the International Olympic Committee: How do we, for example, reconcile the paradox of welcoming a refugee team during an event responsible for displacing 77,000 more?

A partial answer comes in recognizing that “refugee” is not a nationality, a flag by which to march under, but a status we as a global community have forced upon these individuals. Continue reading “‘Refugee’ Revisited: Rio 2016” →

Uncategorized

Analyzing the Inexplicable

June 13, 2016June 13, 2016 Chris Chang-Bacon

Cullen

A Columbine reference eerily appears in today’s class reading.

We’re discussing how to teach analytical writing—going beyond recounting, adding original, evidence-based conclusions that inform, uncover, and expand our own thinking, and hopefully public discourse.

The book’s author, Kelly Gallagher, uses Dave Cullen’s 2009 account of the Columbine massacre as an exemplar for his students, illustrating how the author “moved past simply telling what happened by delving into why the tragedy unfolded the way it did.”

He goes on to note how the shock-jock reporting and lack of rigorous analysis that followed the shooting has led to years of misconceptions about the tragedy, its perpetrators, and its causes.

The next few days will do the same. Teachers, writers—this is why we exist. How could any of us teach about anything else today?

Please see the following resources on addressing the Orlando tragedy at your school.

– A National Tragedy: Helping Children Cope

– How to Discuss National Tragedies with Kids

– Addressing the Orlando Shooting at Your School