Disrupting racialized perceptions of bilingual student writing: a collaborative autoethnography

Writing instruction in U.S. schools is shaped by ideologies of language standardization that hierarchically evaluate student writing development based on proximity to a monolingual mainstream standard. We draw on a raciolinguistic perspective (Flores Martin Rodriguez et al., Citation2018), six researchers analyze a series of turning points to illustrate how different texts and countertexts surfaced the tensions we navigated in aligning our antiracist commitments and professional development design. We reflect on five years of work in bilingual schools, raise difficult questions about our practices as teacher educators, and interrogate the extent to which we adapted our approaches to confront racialized perceptions of bilingual student writing more directly. In contrast to the dominating discourses and dominant texts through which teachers often facilitate writing instruction in U.S. schools (i.e. monolingualism, standardized English, and language separation with limited attention to race), we center holistic bilingualism, language variation, and translanguaging (attentive to race) as a countertext for thinking about and facilitating language education for bilingual students.