Toward a Radically Educative Global Framework: How Dual Language Education Can Enhance and Support Culturally Responsive Teaching

by Nick Pergue

It is no small task to teach responsibly in the present-day United States. Between alarmingly fascistic immigration policies, an uprising of radically right-wing politics and an increasingly divided social conscience, educators have a lot to consider in assessing how to meet the educational needs of their classrooms. In New York City, there is a particular vastness in the variety of identities and experiences that are reflected in the DOE. As of 2024-2025, there were over 900,000 students in the public school system. 16.8% of these students were English language learners. As a multicultural city, many students are likely to speak a second and even third language at home, while receiving almost all of their instruction in English. The need for an inclusive education that reflects the variety of languages that exist around us is pertinent—but to contain it to simply language is not enough. Our educational landscape must become culturally literate in order to truly serve its students. Looking to Dual Language Programs (DLPs) is a way in which we can construct a culturally responsive curriculum.

DLPs not only seek to serve bilingual students, but create spaces in which students can see their multicultural backgrounds reflected and become culturally literate outside of their dominant American framework. This is a foundation that becomes more necessary every day when preparing students to become active citizens in the United States. As radically anti-human policies and cultural perspectives dominate the American stratosphere, young people must have global knowledge. A culturally responsive DLP classroom has the potential to give students what they may need to liberate themselves, and each other, in American society.

In the 2025-2026 school year, I was on a long-term assignment in a 5th grade French language DLP classroom. I assisted in constructing and teaching the English-language curriculum to 32 students. Of these students, half were native French speakers, half were anglophones and one was an emerging English speaker, having moved to the United States from France that school year. There are around 200 DLP schools in New York City that support languages such as Spanish, French, Chinese Mandarin and Urdu. Language does not encapsulate a monolith group of people, however, and must be conceptualized as a cross-cultural experience. Of the French speakers in my own classroom, many of them had cultural backgrounds in Haiti, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and Vietnam. Herein lies where a multicultural approach to the DLP structure is necessary outside of just language-learning. For French-speaking students who arrived to the language by way of France’s colonization, it is not enough to cover a French literacy curriculum without historical and cultural material. In “Culturally Responsive Teaching through the Lens of Dual Language Education: Intersections and Opportunities,” it is stated that “teachers who enact CRT affirm the cultural backgrounds of students, and are able to connect instruction to students’ funds of knowledge—the culturally developed skills, resources, language, and knowledge that are present in students’ homes, families, and communities…language, then, provides an important conduit for considering the use and implementation of CRT”. Language in a DLP setting can be used to synthesize history, culture and student experience in a way that is beneficial to all student knowledge-building. Additionally, it is urgently important in providing a global context with which students of cultural backgrounds in previously-colonized nations can place themselves and strengthen their understanding of their lived experience.

In “An Archaeology of Self for Our Times: Another Talk to Teachers,” Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz urges us as educators to become critically conscious of the injustices in our society, our educational system and within ourselves in order to give our students the education they deserve. She states that “without a movement toward honest, historically and culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy, generations of BIPOC children will continue learning lies about their histories and will be inundated with incomplete stories about America”. To frame this in the context of multilingual and multicultural education, stories about America can only be complete when placing them in a wider global context. American stories must incorporate not just past history, but history currently in the making—this means teaching from a framework that not only reflects but centers the vastness of cultural backgrounds, immigrant lives, and exchange of countless languages that exist in this country. In my own DLP classroom, we have spent the year not only engaging in French language arts, but celebrating Ramadan, Vietnamese Lunar and Haitian Independence Day. These celebrations have included student-led presentations, the sharing of past and present colonial history, the inclusion of student families and language-sharing. Within a DLP model, these are important cultural infusions for learning language. Once there is a diversity of languages being taught in a classroom, the door is open for the sharing of even more culture—students feel welcome to bring their own context to the table, sharing their home cultures and even more variety of language in the classroom.

Many non- or emerging English-speaking students arrive to the American education system and are expected to immediately place themselves within a context which is unfamiliar to them. Using a Sealey-Ruiz framework, there is an expectation to redefine themselves to fit an incomplete American story. When considering the needs of emergent bi or multilinguals, the DLP model is one which places their identities first. In my own DLP classroom, our one emerging bilingual newly from France was eased into English-learning with the help of ENL instructors, but also by honoring her cultural and linguistic context. As a French-Cuban student, being French was not even her “complete” story. In “Toward a Multilingual Perspective on Reading: Aligning Emergent Bilinguals' Resources with Theories of Reading and Implications for Instruction,” Laura Ascenzi-Moreno states that “while [emergent bilinguals] need rich foundational reading instruction, their complex identities demand an approach rooted in their resources–linguistic and otherwise.” With a range of cultural experiences already in the classroom population, our emerging bilingual was welcome to share her identity, learn from others and expand her own foundational literacy knowledge rather than narrowing it to American English.

Many aspects of a DLP curriculum can be applied to monolingual classrooms. However, it is within the DLP model that language and cultural expansion are embedded and therefore can flourish. The range of what is possible when students are placed within globally-inclusive classrooms are far-reaching. This approach to framing the world is urgently important for building true racial and cultural inclusivity. We cannot be liberated from a growing American fascism through neoliberal molds which ultimately still rely on placing people in categories of “us” and “them”. We must build a global framework for students in which their education centers the vast experiences of all kinds of people, everywhere. A DLP model has the potential to enact this kind of radical culturally-sustaining teaching.

References

• https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02975
• https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/nycps-data-at-a-glance
• https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/multilingual-learners/english-language-learners
• “Toward a Multilingual Perspective on Reading: Aligning Emergent Bilinguals'
• Resources with Theories of Reading and Implications for Instruction” - Laura
• Ascenzi-Moreno https://ila-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.brooklyn.ezproxy.cuny.edu/doi/epdf/10.1002/trtr.2324
• “An Archaeology of Self for Our Times: Another Talk to Teachers” - Yolanda
• Sealey-Ruiz https://publicationsncte.org/docserver/fulltext/ej/111/5/englishjournal31819.pdf?expires=1778891489&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=CE46AB9223E26854484091F30B647805
• “Culturally Responsive Teaching through the Lens of Dual Language Education: Intersections and Opportunities” - Tammy Oberg De La Garza, Alyson L. Lavigne, Shouqing Si https://www.hrpub.org/download/20200330/UJER50-19515363.pdf