Getting Specific About Family Engagement and Dual Language Learners

As scorched and polarized (and petty) as education debates can be, there are some things that pretty much everyone agrees on. Like family engagement. There’s simply nothing wrong with that. Essentially no one is opposed to the basic notion that teachers and schools should keep families informed about their children’s progress at school, partner with families to invest them in classroom objectives, and so on and so forth.

And this widespread acceptance swells to unanimity when it comes to dual language learners (DLLs). Everyone who writes about DLLs, children of immigrants, and Hispanic students emphasizes the importance of working with their families. Everyone.

There are many reasons this matters a lot for DLLs’ success: families that speak a non-English language at home sometimes struggle to communicate with educators and administrators that speak only English. Many teachers may have limited experience working with culturally and linguistically-diverse communities. Some families may come from cultures that traditionally treat schools’ work as a domain exclusively for educators. Many educators and administrators may mistake this predisposition for a lack of familial investment. Some families may also have low socioeconomic standing—and thus have limited time and resources to commit to working with schools. And so on and so forth.

The challenge, however, is that much of the writing on engagement with DLLs’ families ends approximately at this point. DLL advocates and researchers note that it matters, that language, culture, and socioeconomic factors may be related barriers, and then urge educators to do something about that. But we rarely get into details—let alone details that other districts and educators could replicate.

Last week, I came across some research that improves a bit on this model, however. In the study, “Language-in-education policies, immigration and social cohesion in Catalonia: the case of Vic,” University of Aberystwyth researcher Catrin Wyn Edwards offers a relatively comprehensive view of how family engagement policies can be aligned with other institutions.

Specifically, Edwards explores how Vic, a small town in Catalonia, Spain, has responded to increasingly levels of immigration in recent years. Vic is a small city in an agricultural part of the region, and one quarter of the residents are now immigrants. This has presented local authorities with considerable challenges as far as support for immigrant assimilation is concerned.

But there’s an intriguing linguistic angle as well. For decades, under General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, Catalans faced restrictive (Castillian) Spanish-only language policies. When Franco passed away and democracy was reestablished, they went to work rebuilding the language’s presence in their schools and society. Catalan became the primary language of instruction in Catalan schools, but Edwards notes that “it was expected that pupils would master both Catalan and Castilian by [graduation].”

Vic is one of the strongholds of the Catalan language in Spain—nearly 90 percent of residents understand the language, and nearly a quarter of residents speak it. So when immigrants began arriving from elsewhere in Spain—and then from all over the world (Edwards’ study mentions immigrants from China, India, Ecuador, and Ghana)—it posed a potential challenge for the project of revitalizing Catalan.

This is part of why Vic’s response to increased immigration is so remarkable. Rather than insulating their schools from the new linguistic diversity, authorities made a series of decisions to support immigrant assimilation into local schools. They found that immigrants were clustering in several areas, and thus ending up heavily represented in nearby schools. So they established a quota system to integrate newcomer students into schools throughout the area.

But there is only so much that can happen if schools are doing the work of linguistic development alone. Edwards cites a 2004 regional document that recognizes that this work extends beyond schools’ purview:

It is necessary to raise awareness, promote and consolidate Catalan [sic] as the mainstay of a multilingual and intercultural education policy in order to achieve greater social cohesion…It is vital that the pupil’s family accepts and plays a role in learning, particularly when it comes to immigrant families.

That is, authorities presented the acquisition of Catalan is a broader social project that is broadly compatible with development of a diverse, cosmopolitan, and multilingual society. Call it a “Catalan Plus” approach. And it’s a project that requires engaging families.

So Vic opened an “Education Welcome Space” (Espai de Benvinguda Educativa) to help support immigrant families transitioning to Catalan society. It provided language classes for students as they prepared to enroll in local schools, connected them to local cultural resources, and helped connect older teenagers to workforce training opportunities. As Edwards puts it, the space “aimed to introduce immigrants to their new linguistic, social and cultural surroundings and promote the use of Catalan through educational and cultural activities.” And all of these elements had an indirect economic aspect. In other words, it aimed to provide families with useful knowledge that would allow them to take part in community life—rather than living at its margins.

These assimilation support services are certainly valuable in their own right, but they’re only part of the story. The Espai offered those tangible supports as part of a broader project of “fostering a positive attitude towards the Catalan language and culture” in immigrant families. That is, these supports aim to get families invested in the project of learning Catalan and participating fully in Catalan society. Edwards suggests that this is proof that immigrant families can support DLLs’ second language acquisition even if they know nothing of that language themselves.

While this is an encouraging picture, it’s important not to over-idealize the case. In 2012, the Guardian reported that Vic’s local council “voted to prevent illegal immigrants from registering as residents as a means of denying them access to health and other public services.” The decision did not stand, but it shows that a comprehensive approach to family engagement and school language policy is no guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Also, after serving hundreds of families, the Espai closed in 2012 as immigration rates decreased.

The program’s promise stemmed from its alignment with various social and political institutions across multiple levels of governance. That is, Vic’s Espai was concordant with broader Catalan language policies and social norms. It also recognized families as an essential part of both immigrant students’ educations and the broader project of building a plural society. They provided targeted language instruction to prepare their DLL immigrant students for the integrated schools they would attend.

This sort of intentional, systemic approach to immigrant assimilation and multilingualism is great. But it’s also difficult to replicate exactly as-is since it relies on specific cultural norms and governance structures. But it’s a vision of—and approach to—family engagement that has a reasonably well-defined theory of action and core moving parts.

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Note: This post is part of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Click here for more information on this team’s work.