Volume 10 Issue 1 2016 AMAE Open Issue Editors Patricia Sánchez The University of Texas at San Antonio Antonio J. Camacho AMAE, Inc. Associate Editors Julie L. Figueroa Sacramento State Lucila D. Ek The University of Texas at San Antonio Association of Mexican American Educators Journal A peer-reviewed, open access journal Journal Website: http://amaejournal.utsa.edu http://amaejournal.utsa.edu/ Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 36 Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education: Developing Sociopolitical Consciousness to Contest Language Education Policies Juan A. Freire Brigham Young University Abstract Language education policies in the United States have affected the education of Latina/o students, especially those en la frontera, including those enrolled in dual language education. Pre-service and in-service teachers in the field of dual language education can benefit from viewing Latina/o students as nepantleras/os when examining language education policies. In addition, it is necessary for those educators to develop sociopolitical consciousness in order to advocate for their students and to contest restrictive language education policies affecting nepantlera/o students in the physical and/or psychological borderlands. Similarly, dual language teachers need to support their students’ development of sociopolitical consciousness in order to empower them to contest oppressive language education policies impacting their educational lives. For this, there is a need to transform dual language education and include sociopolitical consciousness as one of its goals. Keywords: Borderlands, language education policy, dual language education, nepantla, sociopolitical consciousness Introduction The history of the schooling of Latinas/os in the United States is plagued by racism, classism, and linguicism. Language education policies have served to maintain the social order, resulting in language loss across generations, assimilation, and poor academic achievement (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010; Valenzuela, 1999; Wiley & Wright, 2004). Additionally, the continuous attacks on bilingual education have served as a stumbling block for the academic success of Latina/o students (San Miguel, 2004)—attacks that have “more to do with political than pedagogical considerations” (Crawford, 2000, p. 7). Although there are challenges and contradictions in terms of the real beneficiaries of dual language (DL) education (Valdés, 1997; Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 37 Valdez, Delavan, & Freire, 2014) this type of bilingual education offers Latina/o students the possibility to meet the three goals of DL education—academic achievement, bilingualism/biliteracy, and bi/multiculturalism. DL education has programs starting in kindergarten/first grade, and running for at least five years with 50% or more of the instructional time delivered in the target language (Baker, 2011). Since the inception of DL education in the United States by Cuban refugees in 1963 (Baker, 2011), the number of DL programs has grown enormously, especially in the last decade, becoming a popular form of bilingual education across the country. Because Spanish-English programs are the most common type of DL education, a high number of Latina/o students across the nation are registered in this form of bilingual education, which can be greatly beneficial. Large-scale studies show how highly effective this type of education can be to obtain academic achievement, bilingualism, and biliteracy for all students regardless of their socioeconomic status or linguistic proficiency (Collier & Thomas, 2004; Lindholm-Leary, 2001; Thomas & Collier, 2002). DL programs provide English learners (ELs) with academic and linguistic benefits without the need to sacrifice their culture or individual identities (Alanís & Rodríguez, 2008). Additionally, DL education has the potential to validate the unique linguistic experiences and daily linguistic border crossing of Latina/o students in DL education while being in the physical or psychological borderlands. In this essay, I use the teoría de nepantla (Anzaldúa, 2002; Keating, 2006) to portray Latina/o students as nepantleras/os in DL education, whether they live in the physical and/or psychological borderlands, to stress the importance of contesting language education policies and practices that overlook students’ linguistic practices and socio-realities in the nepantla. The purpose of this essay is to highlight the need to promote the development of sociopolitical consciousness for pre-service and in-service teachers in the field of DL education and their nepantlera/o students in regards to how language education policies are designed and intended to operate, and how those policies affect the schooling of Latinas/os. I hope this work can contribute to pre-service and in-service teachers in DL education—whom I will refer to as DL teachers/educators throughout this essay—teacher educators, and those who are involved in DL education. My positionality is based on my professional experience as a former DL educator, a scholar in DL education, and as a current teacher educator en la frontera (at the time of writing Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 38 this manuscript) whose dominant language is Spanish; I also identify as an advocate for Latina/o students in Spanish-English DL education. In the rest of this essay, first, I situate and expand the concept of nepantlera/o students in DL education. Second, I provide an overview of language education policies in this country and present the importance of DL teachers adopting their role of language policy makers. Lastly, I discuss the importance of DL teachers and students developing their sociopolitical consciousness in order to contest oppressive language education policies and argue that sociopolitical consciousness should be a goal of DL education. Nepantleras/os in Dual Language Education Borderlands encompass the physical/geographical location and psychological/symbolic spaces affecting students’ everyday lives. For a better understanding of what I refer to with linguistic borderlands, I find it necessary to adopt the term nepantla. Going back to the beginning of the 16th century, Jaramillo and McLaren (2011) discuss the origins of nepantla in the colonial context of the cultural and spiritual practices, adopted by las indígenas in México as a result of the Spanish conquest. This colonial process, which affected language among other things, situated las indígenas in what is now called nepantla, “an intermediary space sin rumbo (a ‘borderland’ of ‘betwixt-and-between’)… In nepantla, las indigenas began to undo the trauma of colonization” (p. 60). The cultural and spiritual practices had the goal of healing and searching for equilibrium and empowerment while being in between border spaces. Centuries after the commencement of nepantla, Gloria Anzaldúa used the term nepantla “to theorize unarticulated dimensions of the experience of mestizas living in between overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures and social and geographic locations, of events and realities—psychological, sociological, political, spiritual, historical, creative, imagined” (as cited in Keating, 2006, p. 8). Despite those inter-between and overlapping spaces that Anzaldúa discusses, it is necessary to indicate the importance of utilizing “nepantla as a space for emancipation and empowerment, rather than oppression or schizophrenia” (Alemán, Delgado Bernal, & Mendoza, 2013, p. 336). It is also worth acknowledging the unique nepantla experiences lived by each nepantlera/o, since they all experience different socio-realities. As mentioned earlier, DL education is a very successful form of bilingual education from which nepantlera/o students can benefit. All students enrolled in a DL program have the right to benefit from this type of education for the purposes they wish. However, while traditional Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 39 forms of DL education claim to serve all students equally, critical scholars in this field have questioned who the real beneficiaries of DL programs are, since these programs cannot escape asymmetrical power dimensions (Palmer, 2010; Scanlan & Palmer, 2009; Valdés, 1997; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016). A critical approach to DL education gains more relevance when exploring global and neoliberal approaches and discourses taking over DL education at the cost of overlooking the needs of marginalized students (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Petrovic, 2005; Valdez, V., Delavan, G., & Freire, 2014; Varghese & Park, 2010). These critiques and trends in DL education create tensions in the promised benefits of this type of bilingual education for nepantlera/o students. In this work, I prefer to use the term nepantleras/os to refer to Latina/o students registered in DL education. With the term nepantlera/o, I emphasize the everyday language crossing, the linguistic border experiences, and the in-between and overlapping of Spanish and English language experiences Latina/o students experience in the DL classroom. Educators can benefit from taking this into account in the examination of language education policies. Specifically, I conceptualize and relate nepantleras/os to DL education based on the constituencies served in DL education. The three constituencies DL programs serve are: 1) The language maintenance constituency, which refers to native Spanish-speaking students whom DL education serves to maintain their home language, whether or not they are already bilingual; 2) the heritage language constituency, which refers to students whom DL education serves to acquire or recover their heritage language; 3) the world language constituency, which refers to all other students whom DL education serves to learn a world language (Freire, Valdez, & Delavan, 2016). With this, I relate the concept of nepantleras/os in DL education to the language maintenance and heritage language constituencies. In Spanish-English DL programs, both groups are Latinas/os and might share common characteristics, as well as their own unique border experiences on the basis of race, class, gender, and language. Each one of these constituencies will see themselves affected differently based on language education policies since these policies operate differently for each one of these constituencies. For DL teachers to be able to contest oppressive language education policies, they need to have an understanding of how these policies have historically operated in this country and how they have affected the lives of Latinas/os. Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 40 Language Education Policies Traditionally, language education policies have served as a gatekeeper in the educational system (Tollefson & Tsui, 2014) and have been used to maintain power imbalances in society (Revilla & Asato, 2002). The implementation and use of language education policies have promoted linguistic subordination among other types of oppressive results, especially in the borderlands. For example, despite Spanish being the dominant language in the Southwest, Spanish in the United States was deliberately expulsed from the classroom by White control. Spanish was the dominant language in the Southwest from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. However, after the United States had wrested this territory from Mexico in 1848, the Anglos were able to impose the use of English for all public affairs. As early as 1855, for example, the California State Bureau of Public Instruction was stipulating that English would be the only medium of instruction in the schools. (Hurtsfield, 1975, p. 140) The history of Spanish exclusion in schools, especially in the Southwest, is a sad chapter in the history of this country. Disciplinary measures, including physical punishment and Spanish detention classes, internal and external segregation, campaigns against Spanish usage, and language repression were regular practices employed against Spanish-speaking students (Hurtsfield, 1975; MacGregor-Mendoza, 2000; San Miguel & Valencia, 1998). For example, “In the case of the southwestern United States, schools regularly segregated Mexican children from Anglo populations on the basis of race and language up to the middle of the 20th century” (MacGregor-Mendoza, 2000, p. 356). Still, schools continue to promote language loss and assimilation across generations of Latinas/os (Hurtsfield, 1975; Moll & Ruiz, 2009) through what Valenzuela (1999) calls subtractive schooling. Language loss in the U.S. leads to monanglicization, “the process by which languages other than English tend not to be passed on from parents to children” (Valdez, Delavan, & Freire, 2014, p. 8), and has damaging effects for students, such as in family relations and identity (Wong Fillmore, 2000). Furthermore, students’ suppression of their first language can “ultimately hinder students’ critical capacities and prevent the development of the understanding necessary to struggle effectively toward their empowerment and liberation” (Darder 2012, p. 37). The expectation for Spanish-speaking students to assimilate is present even to this day and evident by English-only policies (Wiley & Wright, 2004). As the second most common language in the U.S., and despite being present in Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 41 the Southwest prior to it becoming a U.S. territory, Spanish is perceived as threatening and its presence in schools has been highly contested (Freire, Valdez, & Delavan, 2016; García & Torres-Guevara, 2010; San Miguel, 2004). Language discrimination towards Spanish is documented by President Roosevelt’s words “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language” in 1915 (Edwards, 1994, p. 166), and President Reagan’s words in 1981: It is absolutely wrong and against the American concept to have a bilingual education program that is now openly, admittedly, dedicated to preserving their native language and never getting them adequate in English so they can go out into the job market (Baker, 2011, p. 189). The political sentiment illustrated in these quotes and the active efforts of the English-only movement have put bilingual education persistently under siege (Crawford, 2000). However, it could be argued that these type of English-only statements, as illustrated by Presidents Roosevelt and Reagan, are meant to be sincerely in the best interests of ELs, such as helping them go out into the job market as remarked by President Reagan in the previous quote. However, as Cummins (2000) points out, “Apartheid in South Africa was rationalized in these terms” (p. 235). More than looking for a desire to help, the driving force behind the attacks on bilingual education is fear, a yearning to maintain the social order (Crawford, 2000; Ovando, 2003), and an expectation of assimilation and domestication for Latina/o students. Although Latinas/os have been historically oppressed by language education policies, it is necessary to highlight their resiliency, organized efforts, and activism. For example, San Miguel and Donato (2010) highlight forms of Latina/o active responses to the continuous inequity in the schooling of Latina/o students in the twentieth century; they discuss the contestation of Latina/o parents and community members to eliminate discrimination. One of their actions was challenging English-only policies by including Spanish as part of the instruction and the expansion of bilingual education programs. Bilingual education programs were also expanded thanks to the outcome of Lau v. Nicholas in 1974, a civil rights case brought by Chinese students against their school district in California. This case “was rejected by the federal district court and a court of appeals, but was accepted by the Supreme Court in 1974” (Baker, 2011, p. 380). Lau v. Nichols outlawed English-only education and demanded bilingual education to provide equal education Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 42 opportunities for language minoritized students. However, despite this law, the English-only movement was launched through the foundation of the U.S. English organization in 1983 and the English First organization in 1987. These organizations were determined to support causes, such as the establishment of English-only policies in education (Baker, 2011). The English-only movement demolished the right for many language minoritized students to receive instruction in their native languages. For example, the 1990s brought well-known attacks on bilingual education that resulted in the outlawing of most forms of bilingual education in Massachusetts, and the border states of California and Arizona (Baker, 2011; San Miguel, 2004). Research shows that with the support of the 1994 reauthorization of the Bilingual Education Act and prior to the ban of bilingual education in the mentioned states, there were thousands of bilingual education programs across the country serving about a million EL students (Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016). English-only policies affected ELs, instruction in students’ native languages, and DL education in the United States. For example, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which eliminated the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII) in 2002, encourages English-only instruction, English-only assessment, and does not recognize bilingualism (Baker, 2011), which “denies the bilingual condition of U.S. Latinas/os” (García & Torres-Guevara, 2010, p. 187). Menken (2006) shows that, with NCLB, English as a second language (ESL) and bilingual teachers, as well as many schools, were under pressure and opted for raising the instructional time in English at the expense of instruction time in students’ native languages. With NCLB, language allocation became a dilemma that DL schools and teachers still face, including whether they should opt for a 50:50 DL model—a model that has 50% of the instructional time in both languages throughout the program—rather than a 90:10 model—a model that starts with 90% of the instructional time in Spanish and 10% in English and gradually moves to 50% in each partner language by usually 4th or 5th grade. Language education policies impact DL education in different ways. For example, Fortune and Tedick (2008) argue that English-only attacks on bilingual education in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts created a “tendency to more systematically replace the term ‘bilingual’ with less-politically-charged labels such as ‘immersion’ or ‘dual language’” (p. 7). This was the case with two-way immersion (TWI) programs, a form of DL education in which Spanish-speaking and English-speaking students are within the same classroom. The stigma of Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 43 bilingual education and the social acceptance of TWI as a legitimate form of bilingual education resulted in an exception to the law allowing parents to request waivers for their children to be part of this type of DL program. However, a great number of parents were still left who did not know of this right, and waiver requests did not always succeed (Combs, Evans, Fletcher, Parra & Jiménez, 2005; Mora, 2000). Another case of DL policies is represented by the Critical Languages Program Rule (2012) in Utah, which is serving as a DL referent for other states across the nation. This policy mechanism is exclusive of two forms of DL education, the 90:10 model and developmental bilingual education programs in which all students are speakers of the target language (Critical Language Program Rule, 2012; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016). Although these are effective forms of DL, especially for Latinas/os, and there are two schools with whole-school 90:10 DL programs in Utah enrolling a high number of Latinas/os, the Critical Languages Program Rule (2012) is still in effect. Consequently, the state does not acknowledge the 90:10 DL programs of those schools as true forms of DL education. This language policy was created considering the interests and needs of a White student body population at the expense of the interests and needs of a growing number of Latinas/os in the state (Freire, Valdez, & Delavan, 2016). The exclusion of the 90:10 and developmental bilingual education programs, and the failure to consider the interests and needs of Latinas/os from this policy, positions Latina/o interests as subordinate to the interests of Whites. Latina/o students are being pushed to the margins when taking into account the trends in the distribution of DL programs on the basis of race and class (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Morales & Rao, 2015; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016). For this reason, when taking into account the needs of nepantlera/o students in DL education, it is critical to adopt an equity/heritage framework, which promotes equity for minoritized students and acknowledges students’ heritages (Valdez, Delavan, & Freire, 2014). This is of importance because new trends of DL policy and practice tend to favor a global human capital framework, which has a clear neoliberal agenda and is exclusive of equity/heritage framework efforts (Valdez, Delavan, & Freire, 2014). This has a special impact on nepantlera/o students who are speakers of the target language in DL education, whose equity and heritage needs can be easily overlooked (Valdés, 1997) and their participation in the program can be reduced to offer “language majority students an opportunity to view live specimens of the second language” (Petrovic, 2005, p. 406. Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 44 The language education policies discussed until now have been the exclusion of Spanish in the United States, English-only policies, and DL education policies overlooking the needs of nepantleras/os. In order to contest any policy, activism is needed. For example, similar to the Chinese students who brought to the courts the case of Lau v. Nichols, there are Latina/o students who successfully testified against discriminatory policies and practices against their schooling. Mendez v. Westminster (1946), which served to pave the way for the historical civil rights decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), was a desegregation federal court case in which “a class-action lawsuit [was] filed on behalf of more than 5,000 Mexican American students in Orange County, California” (Valencia, 2005, p. 389). In this case, “some of those who testified at the hearing were children, who told accounts of the segregation and how it made them feel” (Arriola, 1995, p. 185). Another case in which children were involved is represented by Hernandez et al. v. Driscoll Consolidated School District (1957). This was a desegregation case in the town of Driscoll, Texas in which Chicana/o students were systematically held back merely because of a Spanish name, speaking Spanish, lack of English skills, being Mexican Americans, and deficit views towards their community. In front of the federal judge, and their White teachers, principal, and the district’s superintendent, “the Chicana/o children, who testified as 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds to prove their English-language proficiency, understood their role in winning this case” (Alemán & Alemán, 2016, p. 299). The sociopolitical consciousness of these students and their activism in their contestation to racist and linguicist education policies stand as a legacy that students can make a difference in their lives and in society. Educators need to learn and be conscious of language education policies and how these promote inequity. As a response to English-only policies, Cummins (2002) argues that teachers have the right and responsibility to resist restrictive language policies. Additionally, Menken and García (2010) remind us that “it is educators who ‘cook’ and stir the onion” (p. 250), referencing that at the end of the day, it is teachers who, based on their beliefs and epistemological perspectives, end up making, implementing, and adjusting language education policies within their classrooms, despite how those policies were originally intended to operate in a determined educational context. Teachers have an important role in making and implementing language education policy. It is important for educators to understand implicit Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 45 and explicit language education policies and the implications of these in their professions (Hopkins, 2014; Menken & García, 2010; Varghese & Stritikus, 2005). Because teachers’ roles in language policy are paramount, Menken and García (2010) emphasize the importance of teachers understanding and using their role of language education policy makers in socially just ways. For this, it is necessary for teachers to develop their sociopolitical consciousness with regards to historical and current language education policies affecting nepantlera/os students, and that these educators understand the importance of fighting for equity, especially in the linguistic physical and psychological borderlands in which many DL students reside. Similarly, DL teachers should support their nepantlera/o students in the conscientization of these language education policy issues. Sociopolitical Consciousness Becoming sociopolitical conscious is the most important tool for educators to fight against oppressive language education policies. The development of sociopolitical consciousness, also called critical consciousness, focuses on the growth of students’ conscientization/conscientizaҫão. Paulo Freire (2005) says “the term conscientizaҫão refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (p. 35). Sociopolitical consciousness helps students “achieve a deepening awareness of the sociopolitical and economic realities that shape their lives and their capacity to recreate them” (Shor & Freire as cited in Darder, 2012, p. 96). DL educators need to develop their sociopolitical consciousness (Alfaro, Durán, Hunt, & Aragón, 2014), and support their students’ development of sociopolitical consciousness. Actually, Gramsci argues that educational institutions should develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness by providing a setting for a radical, counter-hegemonic education (Giroux, 1988). In order to develop students’ conscientization, Freire encourages educators to engage with their students in dialogues. Speaking of the Freirian notion of dialogue, Darder (2012) writes that it is “an emancipatory educational process that is, above all, dedicated to the empowerment of students through disconfirming the dominant ideology of traditional educational discourses and illuminating the freedom of students to act on their world” (p. 96). It is important to highlight the need for pre-service teachers interested in DL education to develop their sociopolitical consciousness to support their future students. Bartolomé Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 46 (2004) makes a call for pre-service teachers to develop their political clarity and ideological clarity. She defines political clarity as the development of individuals’ consciousness of how their lives are shaped by macro sociopolitical and economic forces, how individuals can make change, and the understanding of how those forces at the macro-level impact “subordinated groups’ academic performance in the micro-level classroom” (Bartolomé, 2004, p. 98). Ideological clarity refers to the comparison of individuals’ ideologies with socioeconomic and political mainstream ideologies, which should help teachers align their belief systems in socially just ways. Additionally, DL educators can draw on over 25 years of work in culturally relevant pedagogy originated and promoted by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1990). She articulates sociopolitical consciousness as one of the three tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy and defines it as the need to challenge social and institutionalized inequities by helping “students use the various skills they learn to better understand and critique their social position and context” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 37), which applies to the contestation of restrictive language education policies. DL educators can also benefit from more recent work by Django Paris (2012), culturally sustaining pedagogy. In his work, he emphasizes the need of fostering, sustaining and perpetuating support to multilingualism and multiculturalism, through techniques like resisting language policies with the “goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society based on White, middle-class norms of language and cultural being” (Paris, 2012, p. 95). Thus far, in this section, I have reviewed work related to sociopolitical consciousness by various scholars. DL educators, including pre-service teachers, can benefit from this work and support their students in the analysis of language education policies. For example, they can formally and informally deconstruct racism, classism, and linguicism embedded in language educational policies, such as in the prohibition of Spanish, English-only policies, and current DL educational policies discussed earlier in this essay. This can develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness and empower them to fight against inequities and discrimination through social justice activism in order to transform their educational lives. This is a way in which DL teachers and students can not only read the word, but read the world (Freire, 2005) thanks to the development of sociopolitical consciousness. However, traditional DL education does not include sociopolitical consciousness as one of its goals and many DL teachers are not supporting sociopolitical practices. When teachers and students have not been exposed to sociopolitical consciousness, students hold what Freire Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 47 (2005) calls a “naïve consciousness,” which ignores the combination of hegemonic forces in school and society. As discussed earlier, the inclusion of sociopolitical consciousness is necessary; however, this is a hard and challenging task for educators (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Young, 2010), including DL teachers (Freire, 2014; Freire & Valdez, 2016). Still, sociopolitical consciousness is a must in the pursuit of social justice. It should be the norm and should not be taken for granted in DL education. The origins of DL education show that Washington, D.C.’s Oyster School, one of the oldest Spanish-English DL programs, and other DL programs have been “specifically established to combat against societal and educational discrimination of minorities” (Howard, Sugarman, & Christian, 2003, p. 38). In the aftermath of the implementation of these DL programs, there were other DL programs that had a social justice focus and fought against inequity (Ahlgren, 1993; Potowski, 2007). Although there is some literature that centers on social justice issues in DL education, there is still a need to show how DL teachers, along with their students, analyze, create, adjust, and implement language education policies in socially just forms in their school settings. Although Palmer and Martínez (2013) assert that in the case of TWI, “equity is explicitly one of the goals of the program” (p. 286), traditional forms of TWI and other types of DL education only refer to academic achievement, bilingualism/biliteracy, and bi/multiculturalism as their three goals. Cervantes-Soon (2014) asserts that focusing only on the three traditional goals in TWI is problematic because it “may blur critical issues of equity that could continue to disadvantage Latin@ children despite well-intended efforts” (p. 64). Without an acknowledgment to sociopolitical consciousness, we can only expect to continue dwelling on the status quo. We need to move towards the inclusion of sociopolitical consciousness as one of the intrinsic goals of DL education (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Freire, 2014; Freire & Valdez, 2016). In the field of language education, as well as in other areas, it is only through the development of sociopolitical consciousness that we can expect change for all. Conclusion Language education policies, such as the prohibition of Spanish, English-only policies, and DL policies reviewed in this essay, are the reflection of how Latina/o children are viewed. Historically, Latina/o students were not only perceived as linguistically deficient, but also “as Nepantleras/os and their Teachers in Dual Language Education Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 48 intellectually and culturally inferior and treated as members of a subordinate population” (San Miguel & Donato, 2010, p. 44). This has been a constant problem, especially en la frontera. The term nepantlera/o applied to DL education discussed in this essay considers the unique linguistic border crossing of students, both as a result of students’ DL academic experience and in their personal lives. Nepantlera/o students, who live within inter-between and overlapping spaces, can benefit from sociopolitical consciousness for transformative purposes as part of their nepantla experience in DL programs. Because of the history of language discrimination, it is imperative that DL teachers— pre-service and in-service teachers—and students in the physical and psychological borderlands develop sociopolitical consciousness and that they critique implicit and explicit hegemonic language education policies that can result in subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999). There is a need to explore in more detail sociopolitical consciousness in DL with social justice ends, especially in the language policy arena. DL teachers need to understand their role as language policy makers, and how they can implement and adjust language education policies to best meet the social justice needs of their students (Hopkins, 2014; Menken & García, 2010; Varghese & Stritikus, 2005). For example, the sociopolitical consciousness, activism, and change brought by the court cases discussed earlier show that, in the same manner, DL educators, students, and other stakeholders can make a difference. As a result, they need to be alerted to implicit and explicit hegemonic language education policies in order to contest them. For this to happen, sociopolitical consciousness is necessary and must be included as one of the goals of DL education. Freire Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal © 2016, Volume 10, Issue 1, ISSN 2377-9187 | 49 References Alanís, I., & Rodríguez, M. A. (2008). Sustaining a dual language immersion program: Features of success. Journal of Latinos and Education, 7(4), 305-319. Alemán, S. M., & Alemán, E. Jr. (2016). Critical race media projects: Counterstories and praxis (re)claim Chicana/o experiences. Urban Education, 51(3), 287-314. Alemán, E. Jr., Delgado Bernal, D., & Mendoza, S. (2013). 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