Laura Chávez-Moreno, welcome to FreshEd.

Thank you for inviting me. I’m very excited to chat with you.

Congratulations on your new book. I absolutely loved reading it. You know, I guess I want to start the conversation on race by really getting into this notion of the connection between schooling and race.

And I think, you know, the social sciences, I think today basically see race as a social construct. It’s not based on biology. It is very much based on, you know, social and cultural and historical forces that shape meanings of race and how they sort of change over time.

So your book basically says that race is also a social construct and it connects it to education. And you connect it by saying that schools, quote unquote, make race. What do you mean by this, by way of introduction?

Thank you for starting this way. When I say that schools make race, I mean that schools help us interpret our racial society. They teach us about ideas about race and what are the racialized groups.

So it’s not just that they are explicitly teaching about identities, for example. It is also about how the policies and the distribution of resources, what those that teaches us about race.

And in terms of sort of, you know, what shapes these racial boundaries, what are some of the criteria that you see that are sort of shaping how we think about race in different times and in different places?

So one of the things that I’m thinking about in terms of what’s shaping the boundaries is how people talk about the different groups in comparison to others, which is actually the framework that I used in the book, which is a framework commonly used or more used, I should say, in ethnic studies, for example, than in the field of education. And that framework is relational racialization. And that framework talks about these boundaries and how different groups are put in relation to other groups, and how that is also what makes us think about what are these different categories.

Because you can’t have just one, right? You have to have others to compare it to or to put in relation to.

Right, right, exactly. It is relational. It’s not just about skin color.

It’s about languages and cultural traits and norms. And, you know, it gets a bit tricky to sort of define. But you then sort of really look at this and how it plays out in one school district, which you call Oakville.

And you’re really looking at this program called the Dual Language Program in Oakville. So can you just sort of explain what is this dual language program? What’s the history?

Why did it start in Oakville?

So this dual language program, some researchers will also know the program as a two way program because it is purposefully mixing students from different language backgrounds into the same classroom. And for example, what that looked like in this Midwestern US context, it means that the classroom, for example, was half students who were learning English, and usually in US schools labeled English language learners, for example. So these students were Spanish dominant.

And in this context, that meant that they were mostly Latinx. And then the other half of the classroom were students who were English dominant and were learning Spanish. And in this midwestern context, that meant that most of those students were white students.

But in the classroom, sometimes there was like maybe one or two black students within also. So the history of the dual language program is the Latinx community wanted their students to have a bilingual education. And they were advocating, trying to find like which which type of program, the program model for bilingual education they wanted.

And they didn’t want the students to be segregated, for example, just like in bilingual education that only targets them. They really wanted the students to be integrated, so they found this model, dual language, a two-way program, to give students opportunity to both be biliterate, bilingual, and then also integrate with other students. So that’s kind of the history of this particular program, the community.

It started, I was in the schools, in the 12th year of the program. So the students who had been the first cohort of that program were just graduating.

So clearly, I mean, 12 years, and I would imagine the program is still operating today. It sounds like it’s a successful program in many regards.

Oh, yes, yes. And in fact, I grew up in Arizona, in the border of Arizona and Mexico, and I wish that I would have had access to this type of program. It was, I would sit in classrooms and wish that I had the teachers there when I was going to school.

So yeah, definitely.

And so I think, you know, it would be really great to go into some of these schools with you, because you write an ethnographic study. As a reader, you’re really taken into these different classrooms, and you hear the student voices and the teacher voices, and you sort of begin to really show some of the, sort of the granular detail of what’s going on in this program, and connecting it to the way in which, you know, racialization happened as your main focus. And so two teachers that we sort of hear a lot about over the course of the book are Miss Schloss and Miss Lucas.

And they sort of said that they wanted to, quote unquote, deal head on with racial issues. So how did they actually go about doing that?

The teachers that I think really addressed racial issues in a way that I found really inspiring. I think that they did that through following students’ questions. And listening to students’ comments and not just saying like, okay, we’re going to ignore that.
That’s a mean comment, et cetera. But actually changing lessons or changing their unit, changing their teaching plans in order to address things that came up in the classroom and in the context versus students. So they did that by connecting it to the students’ lives and then also listening to students.

And do you think they were sort of successful by actually dealing with racial issues head on?

Oh yes, I think that, I mean, like I mentioned earlier, I wish that I would have been in classrooms of these teachers, so yes, definitely. The interesting thing though, if I could add, is that sometimes these particular teachers didn’t feel successful. For example, Mishla’s voice to me shared with me that because she felt that the students sometimes, they didn’t really want to have discussions about things, so then she just resorted to, for example, giving multiple-choice worksheets, because when she gave worksheets or activities where the students would be engaged in discussion, the students just didn’t engage.
So she felt like, okay, she felt unsuccessful in that way.

And what about from students’ perspectives? Were they able to understand notions of race and racialization in a more sort of complex way, or as we were saying at the top, about how race is seen as a social construction? Were they able to sort of grasp that idea?

Yeah, this is very interesting because the students I interviewed were from middle school to high school. So from sixth graders to 12th graders. So their understanding varied greatly, not just individuals also, but just because of the age range.

So some students, a lot of students mentioned that race was skin color. There was an idea that it was socially constructed in order to oppress. That was something, I mean, different degrees of understanding that, definitely.

And then something else that I noticed was that there was a lot of, from the students’ perspective, in terms of how these lessons would teach them about race. Students were very interested in learning about race. When I interviewed them, they were very interested.

But it was interesting that when I was sitting in the classrooms, I did observe that they were, for example, not as engaged or would be bored or etc. Kind of like what Mishlaz mentioned in terms of, I can’t get them to discuss, etc. So when I kind of probed and tried to figure out what was going on, why was there this disconnect where the students would tell me in interviews that they were very interested in learning about like race and other type of issues, but then in the classroom that didn’t really seem to connect.
I think what’s going on was that there wasn’t a progression of the complexity about racial ideas that students were learning. A lot of the times, race was brought up, as for example, about identity and about being racially discriminated against because of someone’s looks. But that was kind of it.

And then the lesson was don’t be mean to others, don’t be exclusive, you know, don’t judge people based on their skin color, which is a fine lesson for students to have when they’re in elementary school. But by the time they were in high school, that is a lesson that’s just tired. So that’s something that I found that there was this disconnect about the progression of racial ideas that students learned about.

And how did the notion of skin color get brought in, right? I mean, at one point you talk about how Latinx communities have such a diverse range of skin colors, and it just makes it even more maybe difficult for some students and teachers to even begin thinking and talking about race in schools and beyond.

Yeah, this was so fascinating to me because the way that people talked about race was about skin color, but then they also would say sometimes like, oh, an identity and culture. And then when I would ask them about the Latinx group, a lot of times it was, well, it is cultural identity. And then, so they’re an ethnic group because of, just like you mentioned, the diversity in the skin tones, for example, that they saw that their classmates had, or that they saw outside of school, etc.

So, it was this disconnect or like it caused some type of dissonance with students in the term, in the sense of they saw this group as having shared identity, having shared culture or some, which we could talk about because that was also probably ties by teachers, for example. But they saw this group as having this shared language, etc. But then, and then also being discriminated against racially, for example, racially profiled, etc.

Or different types of like historical racism and colonialism, etc. So, there was that type of history also. And then also being always compared to or put in the same category as, for example, black, white, etc.

So, then why wasn’t it a race? And it’s interesting because the conversations that I had with students, it wasn’t something that they mentioned explicitly like, I have this question, I don’t understand this, this is a contradiction I noticed. It was more through our conversations that those types of contradictions would come up in ways that sometimes I’m not sure that were fleshed out enough, but were definitely things that I noticed as I was analyzing the conversations.

Yeah, right. It’s quite a fascinating and tricky sort of space to be working. You know, this notion of shared culture is so fascinating, particularly when you think about this Latinx group, which I think cuts across so many cultures, there’s a diversity of cultures.
And so, you know, what is this connection between shared cultures and Spanish language? Because this is a dual language program. So how did teachers sort of navigate that space?

I was very inspired that teachers were very thoughtful about making sure that students understood that there were a variety of ways to speak Spanish and different histories, different cultures, and that not all of the people who are labeled Latinx were, for example, Mexican Americans. So they were, even though that was, and I mentioned Mexican Americans, because that was the dominant group there, Latinxs. But they were very conscious of like, yes, we have to for sure be able to teach about, for example, the Day of the Dead, which in some parts of Mexico, very Mexican tradition, but not in other places in Latin America.

So but they were very conscious that, yes, we have to do that, but we also have to make sure to expand how students view this identity.

And was this identity sort of bounded by the nation state, and particularly nation states outside of the USA?
Interesting, yeah. One of the things that I found was that there wasn’t a distinction really between the group Latinx and Latin American, which in my scholarship, I am very clear to say that the Latinx group is not the same as Latin American. I see them as distinct.

And for example, in Latin America, if you were to go and to speak with people and ask them about, you know, how they identify, they won’t say, oh, I’m Latina, I’m Latino. They will say, for example, I’m Argentinian, I’m Venezuelan, I’m Dominican or whatever, or for example, Mayan. So it’s different in terms of the context, right?

And this is something else to think about, that racialization is very context dependent. So the racial groups that exist in one society, for example, Latinx, don’t necessarily exist in others. Guatemala, for example, has a racial group called Ladino with a D.
That is not a way that the US organizes its resources or distributes its resources. So we don’t have a group that we would recognize as that.

Yeah, right. So in some ways, then, this program is very much a product of the USA.

Yes, I definitely think so, because racialization is so context dependent and the making of categories is really, again, context dependent. It is definitely a US thing. And it’s interesting because when I was in the classrooms and observing, a lot of the times when there were teachings about, for example, the differences in Latinx, what that meant was actually differences from Latin American countries.

So celebrating, for example, people, heroines or heroes from Latin America, versus, for example, people who were here in the US.
And what about language? I mean, I guess Spanish is perhaps a dominant language across Latin America, but there’s, of course, so many indigenous languages that you point out. So in a dual language program that emphasizes Spanish, it seems like they’re not emphasizing perhaps enough the diversity of languages across that region.

So it’s interesting because I did see some acknowledgement of this, but the majority of it was about Spanish. And it was interesting to also see how even within that, there was hierarchies of which Spanish is kind of better than others, which we see also with English, etc. But it’s interesting because the indigenous languages, for example, of Latin America were not really brought up in ways that I noticed very much in the classroom.

I do know that after I interviewed for a second time another student, they mentioned that that was something that was brought up in the Latin American studies class. But I wasn’t there at the time observing that classroom.

And how did the program, or how did you see this program treat the race relationally across the different sort of racial groups that made up the school? Like, you know, if it is relational, then how did Latinx groups and, you know, black students and white students and Asian students, what was the relation?

So it’s interesting. In the book, we try to go through how they were discursively put sometimes in opposition. Sometimes teachers did try to expand students thinking about, for example, who was Latinx.

Most of the time, I think what I would like to focus sometimes I think is important for us to think about is also that it’s actually the resource distribution that then creates or reinforces these different groups. And in this bilingual education program, so it wasn’t just how people talked about them discursively in terms of the categories. It was also about what I showed in the third part of the book, which was about the distribution of resources.

And this program distributed resources differently based on, for example, if the Latinx students acquired English at what the school wanted them to, based on testing, etc. So if they didn’t achieve a certain test score, for example, they were put into lower track courses, for example, a bi-literacy course where they were not given the same rigorous instruction that, for example, the higher tracked bi-literacy course did. If I could share, for example, the bi-literacy course, the higher tracked one where almost all of the white students were there, and they were given the choice of, for example, pick a book and read it with your friends.
Whereas the bi-literacy course was almost all of it was composed of Latinx students, and they were asked to read a couple of paragraphs from a multiple choice kind of like computer excerpt that they just had to fill in. So, you could see that the program knew how to give a rigorous and enriched curriculum. This type of lesson, for example, pick a book and read it with your friends, versus this multiple choice test that we know is not an enriched way of learning.

Right.

And the distribution of resources or of those sort of pedagogies get mapped onto these structural inequalities by race that are present in the US more generally, and I would imagine in that district, you know, specifically.

Exactly, yeah. And then these type of differences in distribution is what then causes patterns in how we see achievement, for example. And then we recognize those patterns and we see, oh, well, the white students are doing great.

And then how come the Latinx students are not? And then that also reinforces the idea that there are these different groups. So this is how racialization happens through this distribution of the resources that then causes different outcomes.

And then we see these patterns and then we think that, oh, this is kind of a natural way, you know, that our society is, you know, these people do this and these other people do that.

And that sort of brings up this very close connection to eugenics, right? Like the idea that different races supposedly have different intelligence. And even though it’s been completely debunked in social sciences, and as we said, social sciences pretty much agree that race is a social construct, in the end, this program sort of is reproducing the conditions under which we might think there are racial differences in intelligence.

I mean, it kind of blows my mind when you lay it out like that.

Yes, thank you so much for mentioning it. And in the book, I didn’t really draw a focus on eugenics. I did mention a teacher who explicitly told me that there was an IQ difference between Latinx students or families and white families.

But I didn’t connect it to eugenics, but you’re totally right to say that it is still, I don’t know if the word is lingering, but it definitely still is present in the way people think about the different groups. And I also mentioned one of the parents trying to make sense of the parent, the mom is white, the dad is Latinx, and then their child is biracial. So the mom was trying to figure out like, okay, well, how is this going to benefit, for example, the student, and then these ideas about the eugenics, and then also this idea that bilingualism helps your brain, for example.

This was also kind of confusing in terms of, well, if this program is supposed to help Latinx students improve, but then it’s also improving white students, then how are they ever going to catch up? As if it’s ingrained in the Latinx students that there is something wrong with them. And it’s interesting because that’s definitely not what this mother would, like if it was explained that way, the mother would say, oh, well, it’s definitely not.

The issue is that there’s these discourses in our society that make that type of thinking like cross our minds and cause some type of confusion, some dissonance, right?

So is one of those discourses really around the brain science, which I see as becoming more and more popular in sort of education discourse globally, where being able to speak more than one language is sort of good for the brain or something like that?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there’s actually this, I think the district had a flyer that said like, being bilingual helps growing brains, meaning like that will help your child grow, like improve their brain.

Yeah, that’s definitely something. And it’s interesting because I can see why, right? Bilingualism in the US, the history is of being attacked and people of color not being able to develop their bilingualism.

Their bilingualism is seen as inferior, their bilingualism is seen as something that schools should not promote. So then there’s this push, right? To, okay, well, we have to make sure that we tell everyone that bilingualism is good for us, that it’s, you know, cognitively sound, et cetera.

Because there was also these discourses, this idea that bilingualism was bad for the brain. So it makes sense. The issue is that, again, it ties to like how you mentioned to this eugenics idea.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can sort of see the sort of political decisions being made. Like, we can reclaim the space of being bilingual is good, and we can use the science of the day that’s popular to sort of show that.

But then there are some consequences of doing so. It’s a really fascinating sort of insight that you make in the book. You know, there’s so many different avenues that we can go with this conversation.

But I feel like, you know, toward for the end of this conversation, at least, I’d be keen to just sort of talk to you about different strategies that you saw in the classroom in your, you know, that worked or didn’t work to really begin to think about how do you teach and promote anti-racist ideas through a program like this bilingual program sort of specifically, but maybe more generally as schools begin to, you know, have to grapple with how schools actually make race and so then therefore the question of how can schools actually be anti-racist?

One of the things that I think needs to happen is a commitment to think about what is the progression of racial ideas that we should teach youth, because it’s fine, for example, like I mentioned earlier, to in elementary school teach about how there’s differences and that we shouldn’t treat others, you know, based on how they look, etc. But think about what are the progression in terms of the ideas that students need to learn throughout their years in school. What should they be learning in high school that’s different from, for example, their elementary?

And unfortunately, in the US, there hasn’t been that commitment. We can compare it to, for example, math, where there is a structured scope and sequence. We guide students to understanding our mathematical world and why math is important.
And in terms of understanding our racialized society, that’s not something that’s happened, right? It’s even being suppressed, it’s being banned. So there hasn’t been that attention to thinking about how to teach the students those ideas.

So that’s something that definitely needs to take place, especially because teachers were very exhausted to bring in lessons that talked about and taught students in ways that would connect their lived reality to ideas about colonialization and things like that. Teachers had to find a lot of the materials, so that’s something else that we need to make sure to provide. So structurally, we have to think about the scope and sequence, and we also have to think about what materials are available to teachers, especially teachers who are tasked with teaching in Spanish, because the materials that were available to them were even less.

So a lot of the teachers felt that they had to either translate what the materials that they wanted to use, which was exhausting, if you’ve ever translated it, it’s just a horrible experience. And it was also, they also felt then, then maybe I should just resort to the English materials. But then again, you know, there’s problems.

Well, when if you’re trying to have students be bilingual, biliterate, and then you’re always just resorting to English when you’re thinking about social justice or critical issues, there’s problems in that also. So we definitely have to provide teachers with this material, the material resources. And one of the things that I think about also, if I go back to this progression of racial thinking, one of the things that I think in high school students would be able to learn about is the process of racialization in order for them to denaturalize the idea that race is just an inherent thing, that it’s just an identity, it’s culture.

I think the high school students that, for example, that I observed, they would have been able to understand this process, the process that society makes in order for us to divide, for example, some folks and then provide others with more material advantages than others. I think that having that type of lesson, especially in a bilingual program that teaches students who are Latinx, for them to understand also their lived reality and for there not to be this disconnect, the dissonance that I noticed in terms of like, okay, how do we fit in into the racial imagination of the US kind of thing, in terms of like, not always just being this forever foreigner, like an ethnicity.

As a final question, do you think, you know, this process that you outlined for anti-racist teaching, which to me just is all very clear, right? I mean, I mean, you know, linking it to the, you know, like the way mathematics is taught and just sort of saying, this is what we do in all these other subjects. And, you know, this is such an important topic.

Why wouldn’t we think similarly? You know, to me, that just makes a lot of sense, you know, practically, and then you think through all the materials that you need. Like, to me, that just makes a lot of sense.

I don’t live in the US anymore, but it’s hard not to read about the US in the news these days. And I see that the Trump administration is sort of cutting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. And I just wonder, you know, to what extent do you think that is going to be a barrier to enacting some of these anti-racist practices that you sort of outlined?

You know, through history, this, any type of progressive curriculum has always been put up, you know, for, for debate and then sometimes banned. So it’s not something that hasn’t happened. And what history shows us is that we do have to organize and mobilize and be in community with others in order for us to be able to provide students with what they need.

So that means that all of us have to be very political, have political clarity in terms of race matters in our society. And we have to make sure that students also advocate for themselves. Students have to organize and advocate for themselves.

They have to advocate for, for example, bilingual education and ethnic studies education. Parents have to be sure to also support by speaking and advocating in their school boards. Communities have to support by adequately funding their public schools.
And teachers also have to connect with other teachers who are committed to this in order for them to find support in this type of teaching, because it is difficult work. And doing it alone is really not the way to go. You definitely have to connect with others, find communities, find other folks who are also invested in this, so that you could also be strategic in how to teach about race.

Well, Laura Chávez-Moreno, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on the new book. And I love the idea of, you know, working with others and sort of pushing it forward despite bigger structural challenges.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And I’m a big fan of the show.

Thank you.

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