Language as “Resource”? Why Science Education's Raciolinguistic Histories Matter Today

ABSTRACT Our study explores how US science education has evaluated multilingual students' languages as deficits and/or assets by comparing them against normative ideals. As a raciolinguistic genealogy, the study situates current premises of language in science education (e.g., as problem versus resource) within epistemological practices shaping the field's own histories of colonial and segregated schooling. We examine key moments when US science education research marked students as Spanish‐speaking, specifically within early 1900s segregated and colonial science instruction and mid‐1900s compensatory and bilingual science education programs. Across these timepoints, we analyze how research positioned the Spanish of target students as a problem but also sometimes a strategic resource—one deemed useful in bringing them closer to universalized norms of productive citizenship. Extending prior scholarship, we historically trace four mechanisms distinguishing some students' language as already valuable versus others' as raw resources needing refinement toward a homogenized scientific ideal. This helps us consider the extent to which recent reforms are disrupting or maintaining these refinery mechanisms inherited from our segregated, colonial past. We amplify prior cautions by identifying how efforts to prove the utility of students' linguistic resources within existing principles of valuation may reject certain hierarchies or norms while inadvertently reinstating others—what we call the refinery paradox. Building on concerns raised in this journal's recent special issue, our discussion supports further deliberation into roles translanguaging might play in dismantling raciolinguistic hierarchies in science education within and beyond the United States.