Beyond “Engaged/Involved”: Latina Immigrant Mothers’ Negotiations of Family-Bilingual Program Relations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

U.S. educational institutions continue to frame racially minoritized families as inferior and as the causes for their children’s educational challenges based on expectations associated with white, middle- and upper-class families. Latinx families can be positioned in deficit ways even in dual language bilingual education programs (DLBE), often lauded for being culturally and linguistically expansive settings. Informed by Critical Race Theory in Education and LatCrit, this study presents counterstories of two Latina immigrant mothers supporting their children’s learning and development during the COVID-19 pandemic in states with anti-bilingual and anti-immigrant legislative histories, Arizona and Massachusetts. Leveraging community cultural wealth, the mothers shared a deep commitment to sustaining their children’s bilingual and bicultural development and wellness. Although they were positioned as engaged parents by the DLBE programs, they problematized static and constrained forms of engagement efforts during pandemic schooling and learning. As such, their counterstories trouble deficit conceptualizations and false dichotomies within family-bilingual school relations and serve as a cautionary tale for educational programs framed as supportive of linguistic and cultural pluralism. We argue for the continued interrogation of school-led forms of engagement to ensure that racially minoritized families engage in shared leadership and school governance and have their knowledge forms and language traditions elevated as crucial levers for catalyzing transformative learning in response to COVID-19 pandemic recovery efforts.