The CATESOL Journal

Schools with large numbers of bilingual and multicultural students are sites where intercultural communication is the norm. This communication is never neutral with respect to societal power relations. In varying degrees, the interactions between educators and students either reinforce or challenge coercive relations of power in the wider society. These interactions involve a process of negotiating identities that are enmeshed in complex relations of power and status that reflect historical and current realities. In the wake of Proposition 227, a challenge for educators is to minimize the impact that is potentially disempowering and resulting from the “official” rejection of students’ languages and cultures. This is not only a technical issue of how to implement appropriate forms of literacy and content instruction when students have weaker language skills. It is equally or more a question of how to create within the classroom and school an interpersonal space that affirms students’ developing sense of self. The framework presented argues that student success or failure is determined largely in the process of identity negotiation between teacher and student. In order to promote academic success, it is necessary to establish school-based language policies that articulate the ways in which affirmation of identity will be achieved both in the classroom and school as a whole.