Dissertation Defense: Malik Stevenson
Candidate: Malik Stevenson
Major: Linguistics
Advisor: Lourdes Ortega, Ph.D.
Real eyes, Realize, Real lies: Black Perspectives on Dual Language Immersion and its Role in Gentrifying Communities
Dual language immersion (DLI), an educational program in which students study grade-level content in English and a partner language, began in the United States in the early 1960s and has surged since the 2010s. Nationwide, DLI continues to rise in popularity (Freire, Alfaro, & De Jong, 2024). To some extent, this is because DLI has been successfully promoted as an advantageous educational opportunity and is widely known for inclusive schools that welcome the integration of students and families from all backgrounds (Kotok & DeMatthews, 2018). Increasingly, DLI has begun to emerge in communities undergoing incipient gentrification (Hyra, 2015) whose demographics do not represent those that have historically been served by DLI programs—namely communities of color (Delavan, Freire, & Menken, 2024). Amidst these developments, critical scholarship has revealed weaknesses in the narrative of DLI as a driver of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), showing that racial and economic inequities can be paradoxically exacerbated in DLI settings because Whiteness still dominates (e.g., Dorner et al., 2023; Palmer et al., 2020). However, this critique has been less inclusive of perspectives of low-income and Black residents who may be at risk of displacement because of gentrification, and it simply comments on observations of the (under)enrollment of Black students across different DLI contexts without input from Black communities or theorizing their underrepresentation. Furthermore, this critical DLI work has been less commonly presented by Black scholars who are also underrepresented. As DLI grows in popularity and continues to emerge in gentrifying areas, scholarship must begin to be considered how it is perceived by and how it affects those communities, especially since little is known about perceptions of DLI in predominantly Black and low-income communities where gentrification may be viewed as a contributor to bringing these programs. In this dissertation, I explore how community stakeholders from two adjacent gentrifying neighborhoods in Washington DC position themselves toward the (under)enrollment of Black students in DLI and how they justify their positions. Additionally, I explore what perceptions they present toward DLI in gentrifying communities.
I conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 community stakeholders who are school personnel, parents of school-aged children, members of non-profit organizations, and community activists from two DLI schools that I call Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. DLI. Both are in neighborhoods rapidly gentrifying but still mostly Black. To analyze the data, I apply a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), specifically its methodology of counter-storytelling (Ladson-Billings, 2022). Through a raciolinguistic perspective, I demonstrate how the interpretive and categorizing practices of racially hegemonic perceiving subjects reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies that are used to justify positions taken towards the demographics of MX and MLK Jr. DLI and their surrounding communities, in general, and towards the (under)enrollment of Black students, in particular. Using CRT and counter-storytelling, I highlight inequities in DLI from a non-hegemonic and racialized perspective by presenting a composite story of a character that represents several interview participants who are community stakeholders.
One key finding is that one’s connection to their community before the implementation of DLI and gentrification can determine their position and could suggest that the reproduction of raciolinguistic ideologies to justify their position is a response to macroaggressions that devalue the language practices of Black speakers of English. Additionally, another key finding, is that it is possible for Black community stakeholders to orient toward both positive and negative perceptions of DLI. Thus, a new category of counter-storytelling is needed, which I call parallel-storytelling. The findings shed light on the realities of Black and low-income communities experiencing incipient gentrification that exist alongside—not in opposition to—the realities suggested by dominant and counter-narratives about DLI.