Madison, WI, U.S.

Day 1 March 15 80-MINUTE ROUNDTABLES 

Sonata Room (2nd floor) at the GORDON EVENTS CENTER 

(770 W. Dayton St.)

2:00 ROUNDTABLE 1. Language as Cultural Practice in Making Kinds of People. 

Thomas Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison; graduate students Gioconda Coello, Belen Hernando Llorens, Mariam Sedighi, Lei Zheng; and Sabine Krause, University of Vienna. 

We view the language of policy and research as a system of reason that “acts” in fabricating kinds of people and differences. We make a number of assertions that order the conversation in the panel. The focus on “language” is not to reify descriptions of reality. It effects a cultural practice that orders, classi es and divides. Policy and research generate cultural principles about modes of life. They exclude in their impulses to include. While languages are spoken, what is spoken is not merely lexical but embodies social and cultural practices that make “the people” as speakers of language. This making of people is political but not what is conventionally considered as ideological or political in its traditional notions of power. Political, as policy and research related to language are the effects of power. They shape and fashion principles about what is said, thought and done. The panel will focus on categories that order and differentiate immigrants from “others,” the “detoxing narratives” or counter narratives to explore how “other stories” of refugees can be told in “different ways; how educational policies of a pluri-national nation in which interculturalism functions reduce cultural spaces, how diversity is utilized and turned from de cits to assets in American education reform; and how discourses of conviviality work to differentiate students on the basis of race and gender in education. 

2:00 ROUNDTABLE 2. Immigrant Identities: Histories that undo prophecies of failure. José Gijón Puerta, University of Granada, Spain and Araceli Alonso, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

In many cases, inclusion processes for immigrants end in failure. These processes involve the interaction of several elements: culture, gender, ethnic issues. Citizens who have recently arrived in a new society retain many aspects of their identity, but there are expectations in the new context in terms of language and acculturation. Then, it is necessary to inquire more to identify not only how they negotiate identities, but the processes of identity reconstruction in relation to the biography and the new social context. The life histories of migrant and displaced children in schools who have completed a successful process of integration into the new community can give us relevant information and keys to undo prophecies of failure. The peaceful inclusion of immigrant groups without violating their rights to a separate identity is probably the biggest challenge for policymakers in the reception countries. Some experiences carried on in Spain can help us to understand the dif culties and challenges of societies traditionally homogeneous to now cultivate the distinctiveness in their new language education policies. Alonso will discuss life stories of Nigerian women from Benin-City who migrate to Europe and show that language, and more concrete words are charged 

with deeply rooted cultural meaning, that can easily turn illegal migration into sexual slavery and traf cking for commercial sexual exploitation; no violence, no chains, just four letters, one word Juju! 

3:20 BREAK 

3:40 ROUNDTABLE 3. K-12 Teachers as Policymakers: Deep, Inclusive Approaches to Displaced and Migrant Children’s Education. Denise Hanson, Melody Leung, MMSD; Francois Victor Tochon, UW-Madison, Kristine Harrison, UW-Madison and University of Puerto Rico. 

This roundtable focuses on ‘teachers as policymakers’ and will hopefully have teachers present who will share their stories. In the classroom teachers are like mothers/fathers. Language and education policy— national, state, school district, testing, curricular requirement—falls on them in the classroom where these are interpreted and enacted. Through this caring (or not caring) positioning, teachers deal with students who have many backgrounds in terms of language, socio-economic and political status. Some students are migrants/refugees or children of migrants/refugees. School inclusion requires the creation of a system of communication with the family and the child. A more bottom-up approach could be helpful. Teachers are often placed in a situation in which they are handicapped by paradoxes that prevent them from furthering their educational mission. K-12 teachers are invited to share their experiences with displaced and migrant children and nd ways of connecting and deepening their Education. 

3:40 ROUNDTABLE 4. Monolingual Bias in Identi cation of Students with Disabilities: Implications for Policy. 

Gregory A. Cheatham & Sumin L. Mullins, University of Kansas. 

US special education law, IDEA (2004), requires non-discriminatory evaluation for students suspected of having disabilities. Nonetheless, research illustrates a continued disproportionality of students of color in US special education programs. A growing number of these students are English language learners, who are both under- and over-represented in special education programs. In this presentation, we argue that IDEA’s (2004) non-biased evaluation mandate and corresponding educational practices lead to the social construction of English language learners through a de cit lens such that language “nativeness” is inappropriately promoted as the standard to which English language learners should achieve (i.e., a monolingual bias) thereby contributing to disproportionality. To this end, we rst review disproportionality for English language learners in US schools. Next, we discuss the IDEA (2004) policy mandate for non-discriminatory evaluation and interrogate evaluation and identi cation practices for English language learners with an eye on current theory and empirical research regarding second language acquisition and bilingualism. Special education policy and practice recommendations will be presented. 

3:40 ROUNDTABLE 5. The Racialization of (im)migrant Students: Teaching and Learning Language in Anti-(im)migrant Contexts and Language Entrapment. Mariana Pacheco and Janelle Perez, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

This roundtable situates the process of learning language, bilingualism, and multilingualism in the racist, anti-immigrant context at the national and state levels. We will share our experiences in K-12 classrooms and with ESL and bilingual pre-service and in-service teachers in different states. In particular, we will address how language ideologies and racist, anti- immigrant sentiment can come to affect the schooling experiences of language minority and immigrant students and the roles teachers believe they can—and do—play to mitigate these experiences. We will address the extent to which language educators and researchers must attend to broader language and raciolinguistic ideologies in their approaches to teaching, learning, and curriculum. 

DAY TWO Thursday March 16

DAY THREE Friday March 17