Honoring Richard Ruiz and his Work on Language Planning and Bilingual Education
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Honoring Richard Ruiz and his Work on Language Planning and Bilingual Education
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783096695 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 01/21/2017 |
| Series: | Bilingual Education & Bilingualism Series , #105 |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.29(w) x 9.63(h) x 1.42(d) |
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Honoring Richard Ruiz and his Work on Language Planning and Bilingual Education
By Nancy H. Hornberger
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2017 Nancy H. Hornberger and the authors of individual contributionsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-671-8
CHAPTER 1
'Language Planning is Social Planning': Reflections on the Language Planning Contributions of Richard Ruiz
Teresa L. McCarty
Like many of the contributors to this volume, I was drawn into the field of language planning and policy through the mentorship and scholarship of Richard Ruiz. Having an office adjacent to his for the first years of my academic career helped. In the same way that Nancy Hornberger, in the Introduction to this volume, recalls sitting with Richard in his University of Wisconsin office as he articulated his now-classic formulation of language orientations, I remember him stopping by my office to chat, or vice versa, or talking with him in the hallway (the walls of which he and his wife, Marie Ruiz, had decorated in a lovely shade of green), or sitting next to him in a taxi en route to a national meeting. In these informal settings, I would listen as Richard casually but cogently elaborated the orientations (Ruiz, 1984), the 'official' versus 'national' policy typology (Ruiz, 1990), and his application of the endoglossic-exoglossic-mixed policy types to Indigenous bilingual education (Ruiz, 1995). Sequentially, these notions anchor the first three essays of this section. Underlying all three are the 'threat inversion' and 'safe/dangerous' conceptions about which he would write years later, and that appear in the fourth and fifth chapters in this section (Ruiz, 2006, 2010).
In a footnote to the fifth chapter, 'English Language Planning and Transethnification in the USA,' Richard suggests that notions of 'safe' versus 'dangerous' cultural differences and their implications for language planning had been brewing in his work for nearly 25 years (p. 1). Yet I suspect he had been contemplating – and negotiating – these language ideologies all his life. This realization came to me in the form of a story told to me after Richard's passing by his beloved life partner, Marie Ruiz. With her permission, I share the story here, as it places the essays in this section, and indeed the entire volume, in the context of Richard's life journey. As Marie related: 'I was so struck by hearing Richard tell it, that the whole emotion of the story seemed to come alive.'
The story begins around September 1953 – coincidentally, the eve of the US Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Richard would have been five or six years old at the time. 'Richard grew up in a predominantly Mexican community,' Marie explained. 'There were some Hopi children he remembers playing with but he had very little interaction with "White folk".' She continued:
[H]e remembers his Mom getting him up early one morning, getting him dressed [and taking] his hand as she led him on a walk. She didn't say where they were going and Richard didn't ask. But eventually they got to the elementary school and his mother found the classroom where Richard would start first grade.
Richard did not attend kindergarten, and this was his first encounter with school. He watched as his mother spoke with the teacher, 'a tall White woman' named Mrs Yates. What were they saying, he wondered, since 'his mother didn't speak English and he wasn't sure Mrs Yates spoke Spanish'? But he remembered that at one point his mother, 'still holding Richard's hand, placed his hand in Mrs Yates' hand, and for a few moments, the three hands were clasped together.' Then:
his mother left the classroom and Richard [thought] to himself, 'She's giving me away – what did I do this time?' ... Still holding Richard's hand, Mrs Yates led him to a desk where he was seated.
As Marie explained the significance of this story:
This is such a strong image of a parent willing to entrust the education of her child to a teacher who is a different color but has knowledge that can build upon the values and cultural ideologies and diversity that each child brings to the classroom. Teachers make choices all the time on what they choose to include and ignore. ... Teachers have a world of colors and diversity to build on and that should never be considered a problem, but rather a resource for the good of all.
'Oh, and by the way,' she added, 'Richard's mother did come back for him at the end of the day and every day, and pretty soon Richard became acquainted with the routines of public school'.
I return to Marie's comment and the core lesson of the story: Diversity is 'a resource for the common good.' It is a lesson that rings loudly and clearly through every aspect of Richard's life work. Like all children, Richard Ruiz entered school with an abundance of linguistic, intellectual, cultural and experiential knowledge – resources that, as Marie Ruiz points out, educators can choose to build upon or ignore. This fundamental insight is, I believe, the bedrock of Richard's work – from his penetrating analysis of the 'complex of dispositions' toward languages and their role in society that he called language orientations, to his assessment of the risks to democracy posed by dominant-language officialization, to his calls for Indigenous linguistic self-determination, to his critiques of the discursive and ideological processes that structure linguistic inequality.
In his path-breaking 'Orientations' article (Ruiz, 1984), Richard asks in what way is language a resource? Building on Joshua Fishman's argument that 'monolingualism is bad for business' (1978: 46), Richard first suggests the economic and societal benefits. Yet, perhaps reflecting memories of his first day at school, his concern always returns to the children and the families who entrust their children to the public school. Pointing to scholarship on the relationship between bi/multilingualism and enhanced cognitive growth, Richard obaserved that 'bilingualism can aid in general concept learning and skill (especially reading) development' (Ruiz, 1984: 28). On the question of affording both societal and individual benefits, he maintained that the 'language-as-problem orientation offers no hope' and the language-as-right orientation 'has had mixed results' (Ruiz, 1984: 28). While not without problems, a resource orientation constitutes the best hope for affording universal multilingual opportunities – a policy stance that 'can only contribute to a greater social cohesion and cooperation' (Ruiz, 1984: 28).
Here, we see a second, closely related Ruizian insight: planning language is, in effect, planning society (Ruiz, 2010: 2; see also Ricento & Hornberger, 1996: 415). It is therefore essential, Richard emphasized, 'to keep in mind this larger social context as we try to understand the role of language in it' (Ruiz, 2010: 2). In his 1990 essay, 'Official languages and language planning,' he put it this way: '[W]hile language planning is at least about language, it is rarely only about language' (Ruiz, 1990: 14). Taking to heart Richard's call for contextually conscious scholarship, in the remainder of this introduction I link his work explicitly to the social and political context in which he lived and wrote.
Although Richard's research was international in scope, he came of age and spent the bulk of his career in the borderlands of the southwestern United States, a geographic, social and political setting that figured prominently in his work. In 1966, when Richard was 18, the National Education Association (NEA) published The Invisible Minority, an influential report intended to make visible the conditions of teaching and learning for Spanish-speaking students in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Tucson educator Maria Urquides led the NEA study, and at the NEA's request, the research was undertaken by bilingual, mostly Mexican American teachers in Tucson schools. Presaging Richard's language-as-resource orientation, the teacher-researchers 'recognize[d] the Spanish-speaking ability of Mexican-American students as a distinct asset ... to build on ... rather than to root out,' and called for programs that 'relate closely to the needs, interests and ability' of Mexican American students in public schools (NEA, 1966: v, 27). The survey is credited with providing a key evidentiary base for the Bilingual Education Act (BEA), passed two years later as a Title VII amendment to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Richard would both interrogate and actively seek to improve the BEA (and the ESEA) throughout his career.
In 1986, two decades after publication of The Invisible Minority, California voters approved Proposition 63, a constitutional amendment declaring English the state's official language. Part of the US English Movement, the California initiative gave rise to a parallel referendum in Arizona, where Richard had recently joined the faculty at the University of Arizona (UA). In 1987, Professors Karen Adams and Daniel Brink of Arizona State University (ASU) convened a conference there, with the goal of 'bringing some light to the heat that will doubtless be generated ... as U.S. English continues' (Adams & Brink, 1990: vi). The papers in the conference focused on four states represented in the NEA study: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. Richard was an invited speaker, and there I had the privilege of hearing him deliver an early version of the second essay in this part, 'Official Languages and Language Planning' (Ruiz, 1990).
In that essay, he brilliantly lays out a concise description of the multidisciplinary field of language planning – 'a literature that is not generally well-known in the United States' (Ruiz, 1990: 12) – followed by his 'national' - 'official' language typology and five propositions that constitute 'the beginnings of a conceptual framework' for language officialization (Ruiz, 1990: 22). Reminding us again of the importance of social context, he suggests that during 'a period of unparalleled English hegemony domestically and internationally,' the quest to make English an official (as opposed to national) language was driven by 'matters much broader than language itself' (Ruiz, 1990: 14, 22). This 'is a puzzle,' he said, leaving readers to ponder, with him, 'why the U.S. should disrupt a 200 year history of relatively successful linguistic tolerance by imposing language officialization' (Ruiz, 1990: 22, 24).
This paper and the larger environment it reflects were harbingers of policy developments to come. Increasingly harsh language restrictionism would characterize the sociopolitical context for all of Richard's remaining work. In this context we see him, in the third essay in this section, urging Indigenous communities to 'begin now' to implement endoglossic, community-driven policies 'that will reinforce past efforts in bilingual education while simultaneously stabilizing community heritage languages' (Ruiz, 1995: 71). At the time of that writing, Fishman had recently published his seminal treatise, Reversing Language Shift (Fishman, 1991), in which he presented the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), an empirically informed theoretical framework for language loss and revitalization. Indigenous concerns about those very issues were growing, nowhere more so than in the US Southwest, motivating the special issue of the Bilingual Research Journal, 'Indigenous language education and literacy,' in which Richard's 1995 essay appears (McCarty & Zepeda, 1995). A long-time ally of UA's American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) (which he helped to fund), Richard was well aware of Indigenous community concerns. Examining the 'mixed history' of the BEA, which, for many years, had supported AILDI participants and their bilingual education programs, Richard cautioned that the BEA was 'a monolingual policy with the goal of anglification. For American Indian and other language minority communities,' he warned, 'this is an explicitly exoglossic policy':
If, in fact, federally funded bilingual education programs in American Indian communities have served the purposes of language renewal ..., it is testimony to the ingenuity and dedication of the staffs of those programs, not the policy itself. ... I suggest starting now on the development of endoglossic language policies that can serve to reinforce and stabilize community languages ... the language planning decisions that are made now will help communities achieve the continuity of tradition that has served them so well up to now. (Ruiz, 1995: 79)
How prescient were those words! Just six years later, under the ultra-conservative administration of President George W. Bush, the word 'bilingual' would be expunged from the newly reauthorized ESEA known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), high-stakes English-only testing would become the chief measure of student achievement, and federal funding for bilingual education programs would cease. The question posed by Richard at the 1987 ASU conference reverberates in these policy developments: How and why, in 'a period of unparalleled English hegemony,' did such a policy shift come about? 'It suggests, perhaps,' as he wrote years before the passage of NCLB, 'that the actual "risk" perceived by [dominant policymakers] is something beyond language' (Ruiz, 1990: 22).
This brings us to threat inversion. In the fourth (2006) essay, Richard argues that inverted threat discourses – claims that powerful English must be protected from 'smaller' languages through officialization and language restrictionism – 'reverse the normal logic where the weakest who are in real danger menace the strongest' (p. 1). He offers an 'A-to-H' typology of linguistic threat, where type A – the genuine threat faced by minoritized speakers in contact with speakers of dominant-aggressive languages – leads to minority-language death, and type H –perceived threats to linguistic hegemons – leads to the (further) oppression of minoritized communities. Subtractive language education policies (e.g. NCLB) are key mechanisms through which threat inversion discourses become normalized. 'We cannot be seen to be oppressive of minority communities merely because their cultural practices are exotic to us,' Richard pointed out. 'Somehow, these have to be perceived as dangerous':
This is the beginning of [threat inversion] discourse. It is only by showing that the common good is threatened by linguistic and cultural fragmentation that such discourses are not only accepted but convincing. The consequence is a mobilization of extremely strong political and economic forces against very weak ones. (Ruiz, 2006: 7)
We come now to the safe/dangerous analysis presented in Richard's 2010 article, 'English Language Planning and Transethnification in the USA.' Let us recall the sociopolitical climate in Arizona and the nation at the time. Under NCLB, the former BEA had been renamed the English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement Act. By 2010, NCLB was in its eighth year of implementation, with growing critiques of its withering effects on bi/multilingualism (Hornberger, 2006; Wiley & Wright, 2004), its discriminatory assessments and promotion of narrow 'teach-to-the-test' pedagogies (Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Solórzano, 2008), and its debilitating impacts on speakers of endangered Indigenous languages (Beaulieu et al., 2005; McCarty, 2008; Wyman et al., 2010). In Arizona, the state legislature had just approved anti-immigrant legislation that a federal judge later ruled encouraged racial profiling, alongside a ban on Mexican American Studies in public schools on the grounds that such classes promote the 'overthrow of the United States government' (Hull, 2010, para 8). During the week in which the anti-immigration law and the ethnic studies ban were approved, the state superintendent of public instruction ordered school districts to remove teachers with 'accents' from teaching English. Meanwhile, as part of a successful 2000 'English for the Children' initiative (Arizona Proposition 203), English learners were (and remain) segregated for much of the school day in mandated English language development classes where they are prohibited from using their mother tongue to learn.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Honoring Richard Ruiz and his Work on Language Planning and Bilingual Education by Nancy H. Hornberger. Copyright © 2017 Nancy H. Hornberger and the authors of individual contributions. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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