Chapter 13: Transformation and Agency: Participatory Action Research with Bilingual Undergraduates

As a rapidly increasing number of linguistic minority students¹ enter colleges and universities in the United States, educators are faced with a demographic imperative to serve diverse student populations (Banks & Banks, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1999). Thirty-one percent of college students were considered to be part of a racial or ethnic minority group in 2002 (U.S. Department of Education, 2005).² Diverse student populations bring a wide range of sociocultural and linguistic knowledge (Gee, 1992). However, in college education these students also seem to be submerged in “the academic literacy mode where ‘everyone’ is learning a ‘new language’ and ‘new culture’ at university” (Leung & Safford, 2005, p. 307). As is evident to those who work with language minority students, these individuals have fewer possibilities for full participation in academic spheres than their ‘mainstream’ counterparts who, as Gee (1992, p. 33) has suggested, have already acquired academic discourse by “enculturation (apprenticeship) into social practices through scaffolded and supported interactions with people who have already mastered the Discourse” (Valdés, 2004).³ As a result, linguistic minority students are often treated as “deficient,” “limited,” or “inadequate” by faculty, administration, and mainstream peers and, thus, feel marginalized, alienated, and devalued within institutions of higher education.