CONTESTING AND CHALLENGING STUDENT MULTILINGUALISM AT NORTHSIDE
Every teacher we interviewed and observed at Northside cared deeply about their students' academic success and every one believed that their pedagogical approaches "recognized," "respected," and "valued" their students' linguistic backgrounds as outlined in the Language for Learning Policy. The differences between the teachers' individual approaches to working with linguistic diversity had to do with whether or not they supported the institutional use of languages other than English at school. Although some teachers demonstrated personal respect for their students' linguistic backgrounds, they believed that their students' language, academic, and economic needs were best met through English monolingualism in the classroom. They contested the school board's assumption that students' first language played an important role in their classrooms with pedagogical strategies that promoted and insisted on the use of English only.
In contrast to those who desired English monolingualism in the classroom, other teachers at Northside supported the assumption that the use of languages other than English could help their students meet academic goals.
They accepted and encouraged the use of languages in a number of ways. For example, in Mrs. Lo, Ms. Edwards, and Mr. Robertson's classrooms, students taught and advised each other in languages other than English as they worked on their different math problems, art, and English projects.
Although it was possible to contest the policy's legitimizing of student multilingualism in a classroom context at Northside, it was not possible to contest multilingualism on a schoolwide basis. During the study, several of the math teachers at Northside asked the principal to implement a schoolwide English-only policy so that their individual classroom English-only policies would have more authority. This was something that the principal would not do because she was expected to support all the assumptions underlying the Language for Learning Policy and find ways of negotiating the contradictory desires of English monolingualism and student multilingualism at the school. Barbara Ishii, who was one of the vice principals at Northside during the study and is now the current principal at the school, believes that it is important that teachers learn to deliver curriculum in different ways to accommodate students from different backgrounds. She also believes that an English-only policy cannot be implemented without taking away what teachers do individually to accommodate differences among students. "Students benefit from many teaching styles and approaches," she says. "It gives the students enriched experiences. An English-only policy compromises the benefits students gain from diversity of pedagogical approaches." As well, she adds, "In the real world, there is no building in the city that has rules about only speaking English." Learning to negotiate across linguistic differences, then, is a life skill that all students living in multilingual communities need to develop. In keeping with this analysis of the importance of linguistic negotiation, I have advocated for a multifaceted strategy of promoting both multilingual and English learning activities that are dependent on the cognitive, skill, and discourse development that needs to take place in a particular learning context.
