This month’s Spotlight is contributed by Hub member Molly Hamm-Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of South Florida.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to address public schools’ responsibilities to ensure the meaningful participation of “Limited English Proficient (LEP)” parents and students in educational programs and services as legally required under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. According to federal guidance, schools must communicate with parents “in a language they can understand”, and provide “information about any program, service, or activity…that is called to the attention of non-LEP parents” (p. 37). In addition, the policy states that “it is not sufficient for the staff merely to be bilingual”, thus requiring “appropriate, competent staff or…outside resources” (p. 38) to translate and interpret.
While this guidance targets equitable language access by discouraging schools from relying on students, siblings, friends or untrained staff to interpret for families, scholars find that—regardless of official policy—significant linguistic labor and care work from many stakeholders often supports meaningful participation for linguistically diverse families. Yet this work is inequitably distributed, unrecognized, and frequently unpaid. In addition, a focus on “competency” in translation and interpretation can undermine the natural ways that students and families prefer to communicate bilingually, limiting their full participation.
For example, bilingual support staff may be hired in official capacities to support students designated as English Language Learners (ELLs) and their families, including through translation and interpretation. Yet Julissa Ventura (2020) found that bilingual support staff take on additional nourishment work to ensure students and families feel a sense of belonging at school. However, the keen insights developed through these close (bilingual) relationships are often ignored by administrators. Indeed, a colleague and I found that bilingual teachers disproportionately mediated the negative effects of monolingually-oriented language policies and failed disaster responses that harmed students displaced from Puerto Rico after Hurricane María (Hamm-Rodríguez & Sambolín Morales, 2021). And while some schools develop dual language bilingual education programs to support linguistically diverse students in the classroom, Cathy Amanti (2019) found that teachers working in the partner language complete additional linguistic labor by translating curricular materials from English. This invisible, unpaid labor has negative effects on teacher retention.
Finally, according to Nelson Flores (2023), schools view institutional registers (e.g., technical language) as superior and prioritize “accurate” translations. This ideology prevents interpreters and families from translanguaging and allows dehumanizing views about students and families to be transmitted. Yet even children, in the role of language brokers, do not focus solely on accurate translations. Rather, as Reynolds et al. (2015) argue, they make strategic decisions about their languaging while “speaking to and for both their teachers and their parents, each of whom may evaluate their behavior on different criteria and place different expectations on them” (p. 100). Thus, a focus on providing “appropriate, competent” translation and interpretation services that ignore the linguistic labor and care work of other stakeholders may ultimately limit meaningful participation for linguistically diverse families.
References:
Amanti, C. (2019). The (invisible) work of Dual Language Bilingual Education teachers. Bilingual Research Journal, 42(4), 455-470.
Flores, N. (2023). Toward a raciolinguistic perspective on translation and interpretation. Language and Society, 52(5), 893-901.
Hamm-Rodríguez, M., & Sambolín Morales, A. (2021). (Re)producing insecurity for Puerto Rican students in Florida schools: A raciolinguistic perspective on English-only policies. CENTRO Journal, 33(1), 112-131.
Reynolds, J. F., Faulstich Orellana, M., & García-Sánchez, I. (2015). In the service of surveillance: Immigrant child language brokers in parent-teacher conferences. Langage et société, 153(3), 91-108.
U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and & U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. (2015). Dear Colleague Letter: English Learner Students and Limited English Proficient Parents.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-el-201501.pdf
Ventura, J. (2020). “Above and beyond any other teacher or staff”: The invisible nourishment work of bilingual support staff. Harvard Educational Review, 90(4), 644-666.
Read the June 2021 Spotlight, which also addresses the question of communicative labor among interpreters.