Counteracting Epistemicide: Social and Cultural Capital of Teachers in a Dual Language Program

Authors

Katrina Liu, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow
Richard C. Miller, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow
Jorge Inzunza, HILO COLECTIVO BOOKSFollow

Keywords

Dual Language Immersion, epistemicide, student diversity, equity, social capital, cultural capital

Abstract

This case study explored the social and cultural capital of teachers in a rural Midwestern Spanish-English dual-language immersion (DLI) program as they overcame an Anglocentric epistemological hegemony in their daily practice. Working from Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of social capital and Rios-Aguilar and Kiyama’s (2012) approach to funds of knowledge, this research demonstrated that DLI teachers faced challenges ranging from resistance by non-DLI teachers in the school afraid of losing their jobs, to a broader fear of the DLI program taking resources away from the monolingual anglophone classrooms. To overcome these challenges, the DLI teachers drew extensively on their global social networks to resuscitate knowledge systems under attack from an Anglocentric epistemology, leveraging their existing social and cultural capital to benefit the community as a whole through an authentic Spanish-language epistemology.

DOI

10.15760/nwjte.2022.17.3.12

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38814

Recommended Citation

Liu, Katrina; Miller, Richard C.; and Inzunza, Jorge (2022) "Counteracting Epistemicide: Social and Cultural Capital of Teachers in a Dual Language Program," Northwest Journal of Teacher Education: Vol. 17 : Iss. 3 , Article 12.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15760/nwjte.2022.17.3.12