Parent-professional partnerships are essential for meaningful and effective inclusion of students with disabilities. Research indicates that partnerships with immigrant, bilingual parents can be challenging due in part to unrecognized parent skills and educators’ own everyday uses of English that can marginalize parents during individualized education program (IEP) meetings. However, teachers can reflect on and improve their assumptions about parents’ as well as use supportive dialogue during IEP meetings to support inclusion for students with disabilities who are learning English.
Communication difficulties between immigrant families, who are non-native English speakers, and special education professionals lead to unsuccessful family–professional partnerships. Such difficulties are often attributed to families’ low English proficiency or to limited access to quality language services. Other sources of partnership issues are occasionally overlooked. Consequently, special education professional partnerships with immigrant families may benefit from more critical discourse analyses of monolingual English-driven communication. Using Van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach to critical discourse studies, we analyzed 16 articles on special education partnerships by examining the discourses of monolingual ideologies and biases. The analysis identified three interrelated discourses in the literature: (a) parents’ compliance to monolingual biased norms in communication and self-blaming discourses; (b) professionals’ othering discourses and diffusion of responsibility concerning parents’ communicative needs; and (c) researchers’ role as gatekeepers in the recontextualization of parent–professional discourses. Finally, we discussed how to promote linguistically equitable partnerships addressing each discourse.
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