Three Languages, Many Multilingualisms: Exploring the Cultural Production of Eliteness in a Trilingual Elementary Charter School

In this critical ethnographic dissertation, I explore the expropriation of bilingual education and the cultural (re)production of eliteness through prestige trilingual education by immersing myself for ten months in a small, suburban, charter elementary school called Desert Language Academy (DLA) in the U.S. state of Arizona. Desert Language Academy uses a trilingual immersion model with Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and English as languages of instruction for all students in Kindergarten through sixth grade, and primarily caters to White and English-privileged families who live in the local suburb of Heavenly Hills. Desert Language Academy’s suburban location, private school history, and one-way world language orientation are unique factors that shape the school’s implementation, and are seen as products of Arizona’s legacy of restrictive, English-Only educational language policy and the state’s minimally-regulated “Wild West” school choice environment. A kaleidoscopic theoretical framework integrates social-cultural (re)production theory, neoliberal and neoconservative education policies and policymaking in Arizona, and raciolinguistic ideology in order to critically explore the experiences of students, teachers, and school administrators amid the school’s implementation and growth.The findings interrogate social, cultural, and linguistic processes, as well as political pressures, which have shaped the school’s evolution from private to public charter status, as well as its present implementation of a one-way world language model that prioritizes additional language learning and idealizes global citizenship for White, English-privileged, and affluent students. I specifically attend to the resistive language policymaking of racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically minoritized students and teachers who creatively used language and appropriated language policy in order to contest the construction of DLA as an elite school that excludes and Otherizes racialized peoples while White and English-privileged students are distinguished as elite, cosmopolitan, global citizens. This study critiques the role of multiscalar education and language policies in (re)producing the expropriation of bilingual education and its social, cultural, linguistic, and educational impacts on multilingual students, teachers, and administrators. In sharing these stories, I also intend to illuminate the discursive processes through which racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically minoritized students and teachers hope and demand for inclusive curriculum, instruction, and language policies.