Linguistic inequality and access to education: curricular strategies from South Africa and the United States

Abstract

This special issue explores the ways in which linguistic inequality shapes access to Education and the role educators can play in promoting equity through curriculum development and classroom-based research. This collaborative exploration has grown out of the Linguistic Diversity in Education Symposium and the Alternative Pedagogies and Interpretive Methods in Education Colloquium, which were held respectively in New York at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York (CUNY) in May 2019 and in Cape Town at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in February 2020. The New York symposium was organised in collaboration with Prof. Alberta Gatti of The Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context and with the support of the Advanced Research Collaborative (CUNY). The Cape Town colloquium was funded by the South African National Research Foundation won by Prof. Liesel Hibbert of CPUT. The articles included in this edited collection bring together South African and U.S. perspectives on what committed instructors can do to promote social justice in learning contexts where linguistic inequality creates systemic barriers to academic success. Readers will have the opportunity to reflect on how language is implicated in learning outcomes in both the United States and South Africa, and on how educators can design, implement and assess multicultural curricula that use linguistic diversity as a resource while contending with monolingual ideologies. The adoption of a transnational perspective comparing linguistic inequality and socially just curricular design in South Africa and the United States offers a productive frame of analysis. Historically, both countries have been shaped by white supremacy through racial policies and practices that included language hierarchies as instruments of subjugation (de Klerk, 2002; Kloss, 1998; Macias, 2014; Shell, 1993). While these policies and practices brought some languages to extinction (such as Abnaki, Chimariko and Shasta in the United States), or near-extinction (such as the Khoisan languages that used to be spoken in South Africa), linguistic diversity continues to exist in both countries, albeit inequitably. The constitution of South Africa grants official status to 12 official languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, sePedi, seTswana, seSotho, Xitsonga, seSwati, Tshivenda, isiNdebele and, more recently, sign language. However, the hegemony of the ex-colonial language, English, is still visible in official domains (Wildsmith-Cromarty & Balfour, 2019; Parmegiani, 2014). The United States does not have an official language, and it is often considered an Anglophone monolith, but linguistic diversity has always had a strong presence in this country (Crawford, 1992, 2000) and in the last three decades, it has increased exponentially (Ryan, 2013). According to the U.S. Census bureau, 63.1 million U.S. residents spoke a language other than English (LOTE) at home, which accounts for the 21.9% of the population. In spite of such high levels of linguistic diversity and a constitution which mandates parity of status among its 11 official languages, English continues to dominate the education system