Academic Mothers’ Definitions of Bilingualism, Bilinguality, and Family Language Policies

Abstract

Bilingual partnerships (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) and transnational families (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) are on the rise. With mothers spending more time with their children at home, even in dual career partnerships (Hochschild & Machung, 1989), the labor of family language policy (FLP) implementation often falls on them. While increasingly more new hires in academia are women (Finkelstein, Seal, & Schuster, 1998), only 31% of them are mothers (Perna, 2003). In this work, we examine the dominant discourses regarding bilingualism and FLP among academic mothers who find themselves at an intersection of multiple and often competing social positions. Data was collected from 46 academic mothers residing in linguistically-different host societies but all whom gather in an online community they have co-created. Data collection procedure included 22 open-ended questions exploring bilingualism and FLP orientations. Iterative and recursive content analysis was performed, yielding thematic patterns centering around language ideologies, practices, and bilinguality.

“We Speak Pidgin!” – Family Language Policy as the Telling Case for Translanguaging Spaces and Monolingual Ideologies

“…Curious about their home language policies, we asked about the practices within the home and how they came to decisions regarding language management. His response was supportive of previous findings: parents make decisions regarding the languages in their lives based in large part on their own past experiences (Hirsch, 2017;Hirsch and Kayam, 2020). While sharing his family's story, Vlady seemed to view himself as an expert and a novice in his language proficiencies, an immigrant and a native, and new and old.…”

Academic mothers, professional identity and COVID‐19: Feminist reflections on career cycles, progression and practice

“…In view of this failure, this paper engenders a polyphonic feminist narrative that attempts to centralize the personal experiences of six academic mothers at an Australian university in order to critically disrupt institutional conversations around gender equity and academic motherhood. It further aligns with Hirsch and Kayam's (2020) definition of academic mothers, which ranges from "doctoral students to full tenured professors, researchers, and any mothers who self-identified as an academic, based on their level of education and current or past professional activities that necessarily included an academic institutional setting" (p. 27). Our methodological aim is to put into practice feminist scholarship that champions women's personal experience -or auto-ethnography more broadly -as a legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry, as well as one that can make new meaning and produce original knowledge (Collins, 2000;Ellis & Bochner, 2000).…”

"Why are you here?" A hearing instructor's journey into a deaf community of practice and discussions of family language policies

“…Sign languages are often overlooked entirely, both by policy makers and educators. In our previous work with academic mothers, a category Molly falls into, we asked 46 highly educated women who work or have worked in an academic institution of higher learning, many as teaching professors and/or instructors to define bilingualism (Hirsch & Kayam 2020). All the women focused on spoken languages, most on oral skills, with only a few of the women incorporating literacy into their definitions.…”

“…We argued elsewhere (Hirsch & Kayam 2020) that any study of bilingualism, bilinguality, or the bilingual individual should begin with the question that clarifies how the participant defines bilingualism itself. This practice will ensure that the researchers are clear on what they are studying, contextualizing the responses and discussions with the participant(s) within the parameters tailored for and by the participants themselves.…”