Culturally Responsive Practices or Assimilation? Views and Practices on Linguistic Diversity of Community College Instructors Working with Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Despite the recent growth of multilingual learners in community colleges, research is still scarce on how instructors perceive and interact with students institutionally classified as English as a second language (ESL). In this paper, I use racialization of language and culturally relevant pedagogy to explain how 6 instructors from first-year freshmen in a community college, serving a high percentage of immigrant multilingual learners, view, understand and operationalize culturally and linguistically responsive practices in their classrooms. I use a qualitative critical approach to analyze data from interviews, fieldnotes, and observations from a year-long study in a community college in a mid-sized city in the South of the United States. I show evidence of instructors’ views of students regarding their cultural, linguistic, educational, and class backgrounds. Findings suggest that even when instructors celebrate differences in the classroom and are aware of the cultural differences, their opinions, and academic expectations were sometimes focused on students’ lack of confidence to advocate for themselves and their failure to assimilate into the mainstream culture. Despite the best intentions, these expectations still enclosed assimilationist views of language and personhood that require students to communicate in ways that often resemble the American traditional monolingual college student. The study of language from a racial perspective can promote powerful ways to understand how institutions structure and operationalize services to multilingual learners; conscious changes in services may result in more equitable practices for these students.