Global Migration and Education: A reflection on cultures and languages in contact and the

need for opening Cosmopolitan views and Intercultural Bilingual spaces

in educational settings

Patricio Ortiz, Ph.D.Assistant Professor

ESOL/Bilingual EducationCollege of Education

Western Oregon University1

Abstract

• The decade of the 1990's saw the largest wave of immigration that this country has lived, with more than 9 million legal immigrants crossing the US borders. It is expected that the decade of the 2000's might bring 14 million people to these shores. Today one in five children is immigrant, but schools have not acknowledged yet the diversity in cultures and languages that global migration and connectivity across-borders is producing in the 21th century classroom. U.S. school practices and curriculum remain anchored to the 19th Century assimilationist mono-cultural and mono-lingual identities and asymmetric relations of power continues to define much of cultural and linguistic contact in schools. Cosmopolitan points of view and intercultural bilingual education spaces have become an important need to incorporate into schooling and teacher education programs, in our increasingly diverse global world of the 21st Century.  

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1. The contradictory dynamics of globalization: tensions between the transnational vs. the local

• In the 1990's more than 9 million documented immigrants entered the United States, surpassing any decade before in the history of US immigration (INS, 2001).

• 14 million immigrants are expected to arrive between 2000 and 2010 (Fix & Passel, 2003).

• By 1997, a 62% of the population of Los Angeles was of migrant stock (first or second generation), 54% of New York, 43% of San Diego and 72% of Miami (Portes, 2004).

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• Children of immigrant families are the fastest growing segment of the child population; one of every five children in the US is immigrant. Immigrants constitute 20% percent of the current total U.S. population.

• Since 1965, significant changes in the ethnic configuration and proportion of immigrants entering the U.S., as taken place. Being now almost 90% non European, the majority are from Latin America (Mexico and the Caribbean) and Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, India and China) (USIA, 1997). A 60% of the immigrant population is from Hispanic origin, 23% Asiatic, 2% African and 11% European (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

• Projections indicate that ethnic groups of color will comprise approximately half of the U.S. population by the year 2050 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000; Suarez-Orozco, 2006).

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• Globalization is sweeping across areas of information and communications, science and technology, the market economy and geographical movements of people, which are creating an important ideological shift towards the universal, and the hybrid cultural and linguistic discourses (García-Canclini, 2006).

• Forms of Global Citizenship (Noddings, 2005), are taking place through the erasure of the conventional borders of the nation-state (Bhabha, 1994) and its Unitarian mono-cultural and mono-lingual identity (Anderson, 1991).

• But Globalization has also generated strong detractors among those who see it as a threat to their traditional local values, or as the expansion or domination of Western based neo-liberal capitalism (Hall et al, 1996).

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• Globalization has also created strong reactions for a return towards the local, the ancestral, and in many cases towards positions of Fundamentalism and intense forms of ethnocentricity (Hall et al., 1996).

• The U.S. has not been immune to these contradictions and although its expansion towards the global is evident in the international projection of its economic and technologic spheres, much of the current anti-immigrant, anti-bilingual and anti-multicultural discourses within its borders, are part of this contradictory movement of globalization, pulling in two opposite directions. At the same time that some promote the economic exchange with Mexico, others want to build a wall in its border.

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Main question for educators in Global times• How is schooling in the new millennium being affected

and transformed by the new global order and how are schools adapting to this new reality (if they are transforming in any way).

• How global connectivity, border-crossing, cultural and linguistic proximity and diversity, have had an impact in curriculum, pedagogical practices, management of schools, expectations and skills of teachers.

• How are we creating a critical and reflective awareness for in-service an pre-service teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, to understand the immigrant culture, children, and families, in order to be able to create successful culturally relevant pedagogical practices (Trueba, 2000; Ladson- Billings, 1995). 7

• How are educational systems and schooling fostering the interdisciplinary knowledge construction, by developing the capacity to think critically and creatively across disciplinary borders, and the capacity to interact civilly and productively with individuals of different cultural backgrounds and knowledge (Gardner, 2006).

• How are they fostering the respect for student own cultural traditions, and fostering hybrid or blended identities as they promote tolerance for diversity, which are some of the important skills and understandings for the global era (Gardner, 2006)

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• What are schools doing wrong that current research is showing that second and third generation of immigrant children (especially of Latino descent) are doing worse and have lees rates of success than their immigrant parents (Portes & Gumberg, 2004; Suarez-Orozco, 2006).

• What are schools doing to address the issue that in 2004, only approximately half of foreign-born Hispanics ages 18–24 had completed high school (54.7 percent) and the national dropout rate for Hispanics from schools was almost 25%, that is 4 times higher than that of mainstream caucasian students.

National Center for Education Statistics 2004 Annual Dropout Report. (Nov, 2006)

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3. Educational systems are inherently conservative, (Gardner, 2006) and school remain anchored in forms of knowledge and Identity construction of 19th Century

The largest wave of immigration existing in US history which took place in the recent 1990’s, although has changed dramatically the ethnic, cultural and linguistic composition of U.S. schools, has not being acknowledge at the level of transforming schooling, its curriculum and its instructional practices.

The assimilationist tradition of U.S. immigration and its subtractive schooling model (Valenzuela, 2000) of the 19th Century Americanization, remains alive and anchored to the mono-cultural and mono-lingual U.S. national identity project of 100 years ago, and has not opened the doors to the complexity, and hybridity of the 21st Century global world.

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• The debate about what a 21 Century schooling should be, and the cultural and linguistic diversity challenges that a post industrial Global world brings, has not arrived to the agenda of public educational policy makers (Crawford, 2000). Although many schools and individual teachers are struggling hard to cope with trying to educate a population, who’s complexities they have not been equipped to work with (Escamilla, 2002).

• In current educational settings the reaction at large continues to be towards the dominant mono-cultural and the mono-lingual exclusive project (Shohamy, 2006). Current anti-Bilingual legislation in various states , plus the NCLB mandate have erased important part of what the bilingual education project had advance in decades, in the recognition and support to cultural and linguistic diversity in the classroom. (Garcia, 2004; Hornberger, 2006).

• After 9/11 attitudes towards immigrants have taken in many places a xenofobic edge (Maira, 2006)

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• A National Study (2002) of Teacher Education Preparation For Diverse Student Populations done by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (U.C. Santa Cruz, 2002), that interviewed 900 teacher education program directors around the US, found that with the exception of one state, states have a negative sociopolitical environment with regard to diversity. The most comprehensive programs are university pre-service and in-service programs, which also prepare the least number of bilingual/ESL teachers and the integration of bilingual/ESL preparation across the teacher education programs, showed to be minimal.

• (2002) Center for Research in Education, Diversity and Excellence. U.C. Santa Cruz.

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4. Cosmopolitanism as a viable alternative response to the education of immigrant and culturally and linguistically diverse students

• A Cosmopolitan Multilicultural Identity (Appiah, 2006) as a form of universal concern and respect for legitimate differences, is a valid concept to begin exploring for the creation of new spaces for cultural and linguistic diversity in schools.

• Cosmopolitan Multilingualism as a way of validating knowledge and languages as cultural and social capital that children bring into the school from their homes and communities as forms of indigenous and community knowledge (Moll, 1992).

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Cosmopolitian Intercultural Bilingual Education as a space for multiple, hybrid and negotiated

identities in schools

• Cosmopolitan Multicultral bilingualism as critical counter hegemonic narratives (Giroux & MacLaren, 1996) opening spaces for the multiple identities that Global postmodernity and its hybrid diversity brings.

• Cosmopolitan Intercultural Bilingual education as a project of additive schooling that does not alienate minorities, but links them to their ancestral traditions or their back home cultures and languages, at the same time that converts them into willing participants, and more informed and skilled members of the American dream that the have come to pursue.

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Conclusion: More questions than answers• To be a poor immigrant child from a Polish, Italian or Irish background

walking into an American school in 1907, the previous highest wave of migration before the 1990’s, is a very different proposition than being a poor immigrant child of Mexican, Chinese or Vietnamese background, walking into an American school in 2007.

• One hundred years have made a big difference in the world-at-large in which we live. Today we face very different challenges and possibilities. But unfortunately the schools and the solutions they propose have remained much the same, as in the past.

• This is the point that we need to reflect upon and begin an urgent dialogue about. How will cultural and linguistic diversity be phrased in education and schooling in the current 21st century of Globalization?

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