Promising Yet Challenging: Ethnographic Insights On Head Start Teachers’ Language Policy Negotiations In New Immigrant Settlements

Authors

  • Kiyomi Umezawa University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA

Abstract

This is a comparative ethnography that focuses on Head Start programs and their educators in four New Immigrant Settlement areas in Pennsylvania, investigating Head Start educators’ understanding and implementation of Head Start’s language policy of 2007. The focal point is under this asset-based policy for multilingual children, how the mostly monolingual educators construct their language practices, how they turn the policy into their daily classroom practices, reflecting dialogical relationships they have had with  surrounding facets, such as their language ideologies, backgrounds, training, organization, community, and children. Findings indicate gaps in understanding of policies and language practices among educators reflecting their language ideologies. In
conclusion, the author encourages educators to be policymakers themselves and the author illustrates alternative approaches to currently established notions.


Keywords: Head Start / New Immigrant Settlements / Anthropology of Language Policy

Downloads

Published

2025-02-28

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2025): Post-foundational and Critical Childhood Studies: New and Emerging Scholarship-Part II

Section

Articles (Peer Reviewed Research)

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Those reproducing all or part of manuscripts first published in the journal are asked to acknowledge the International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal.