Bilingual Parent Participation in a Divided School Community (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism)

By: Julia Menard-Warwick

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Synopsis: This volume theorizes parent participation in a bilingual school community in California, unpacking broader issues around language ideologies, language and power, and parent collaboration in diverse educational contexts. Highlighting data from a two-year ethnographic study of the school community, the book grounds this discussion in theories of discourse and bilingualism, with a focus on translanguaging and translingual practice. The volume points to a range of challenges and questions posed by the parents’ efforts to unite as a single school community, including linguistic inequality, cultural divides, and differing implicit beliefs on language. The book documents these efforts as a means to demonstrate the ways in which monolingual practices are reinforced in these settings, despite best efforts, but also as a point of departure to discuss implications and a way forward for parent collaboration in bilingual school communities more generally. Offering a nuanced portrait of the impact of parent collaboration in bilingual school communities, this volume will be of particular interest to graduate students and scholars in language education, applied linguistics, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics.