Chapter 7 Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities: Theorizing and Constructing Opportunities and Risks in Education

The life chances of students are determined by their ability to interact critically with the discourses around them, while still avoiding the temptation to be seduced by the disempowering messages those discourses often contain. The discourse surrounding children teaches them who they are, what their place is in the world and what they need to do to become autonomous and valuable citizens. Language, critically acquired, is potentially empowering for people as they constantly build on previous encounters with the words in their unique search for meaning and value. —Corson (2001, p. 14) Present discourses in the media and social sciences research about acceleratingglobal change increasingly locate individuals and their interactions across multi-ple boundaries: linguistic, cultural, ethnic, racial, economic, religious, political, national, and digital. The fluidity of both perceived and actual movements of per-sons and messages makes it necessary to reconsider how identities are conceptualized and framed as “mattering ” in social interactions across different contexts. In educa-tional contexts, questions of identity are especially critical because the development of educational practice and policies are grounded in different ways of understanding who learners are or should be. How students interpret and develop their identities in a given context is shaped by self-perceptions, desires, hopes, and expectations, as well as salient aspects of the social context, such as sociopolitical ideologies, histories, and structures that are often beyond the control of an individual (Sadowski, 2003). The various ideologies, power structures, and historical legacies associated with different forms of language use, cultures, and situations frame individuals ’ linguistic an