Co-deliberating perceived constraints amid the gentrification politics of dual language bilingual education: an analytical framework and case study of educational leaders’ agency

Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) has gained much attention recently from language-majority families, leading to the displacement (or gentrification) of languageminoritized students and their interests. This case study looks at how demographic, discursive, and programmatic gentrification are either reinforced or countered in one U.S. district with a large multilingual community. We built a research-practice partnership with the district’s DLBE leaders and then conducted interviews with personnel whose work was relevant to DLBE. Our iterative methodology led to a revised theoretical model for decision making that highlights the role of constraintizing discourses, that is, one’s agentive characterizations of the limitations on one’s agency. Our three main themes of our findings were (1) siloing of agency through constraintization; (2) prior Utah-modeled decisions as partially constraining; and (3) agentive positioning around national gentrification trends in DLBE. We close with implications and recommendations for the field, including further use of our theoretical model.