This study investigates why and how Americans of various social locations are choosing Mandarin Immersion Programs, a form of bilingual education, as a source of cultural and linguistic transmission. Mandarin Immersion Programs are elementary school programs where children learn a foreign language and culture through a traditional elementary school curriculum. The growing number of language immersion programs and their locations outside ethnic enclaves, suggests that they hold some attraction to Americans of various backgrounds. To investigate this phenomenon, I examine Mandarin Immersion Programs through three related questions: 1) why do parents, without a Mandarin-speaking background or culture, choose a Mandarin Immersion Program? 2) how and why does a school promote a Mandarin Immersion Program when the student body is majority Hispanic? 3) how does the implementation of the Mandarin Immersion Program and the parents it attracts, impact the school environment? The analysis draws on two different, but related sets of data collection primarily located in the state of California. The first set of mixed-methods data was collected during the 2015-2016 school year and included a 500-respondent parent survey and 15 interviews with Black and White parents. The second set of data was collected three years later, during the 2018-2019 academic year. It narrows the focus to one Mandarin Immersion Program placed within a traditional English-only elementary school. The school serves a primarily working-class Hispanic student population within a conventional public-school district. The Mandarin Immersion Program is a strand of the school, as not all the students are learning in two languages. For the 2018-2019 academic school year, I spent approximately 300 hours observing four elementary classrooms and various parent and administrator meetings. I supplement the observations with twenty-five parent, teacher, and administrator interviews. This dissertation reveals several key findings in three stand-alone substantive chapters. First, in Chapter 2, I find that White and Black parents frame the benefits of immersion for their children differently. White parents want to give their children a future advantage to sustain their place within the academic hierarchy. Black parents choose Mandarin Immersion to circumvent structural issues within the educational system that may impact their children negatively. In Chapter 3, I find that a struggling school uses the immersion program to attract parents from outside the school catchment area resulting in an improved school based on state metrics. The immersion parents that arrive are generally middle-class and begin to occupy many parental positions of influence. I argue that the district does not take the majority Hispanic student body into account because their goals are not necessarily educational or citizenship-building. Rather, the goals are to increase school enrollment, test scores, and resources by bringing middle-class parents into the school through branding itself as a gateway to a global community. Finally, in Chapter 4, I show how the immersion program creates a more racially and economically diverse student body. However, the integration is superficial, and the structure of the program creates two schools under one roof. Mandarin Immersion parents leverage their social class resources to make changes to the school that primarily benefit their children and may eventually push out the families that existed before the immersion program arrived.

Despite concerted efforts over the course of decades to increase the number of Teachers of Color, the profession persists as being demographically homogeneous, with White women constituting the majority of teachers. As the student body becomes increasingly diverse, having educators that are culturally and racially representative of their students will become a growing need. However, in order to increase teacher diversity, there must be an understanding of how to effectively recruit diverse teachers as well as address the deterrents that keep them from the profession. This qualitative research study explores these and other questions by asking Latino teachers (n=14) and credential students (n=17) about their journeys into the teaching profession. The research questions addressed are: 1) How have the experiences of Latinos in schools and on their journeys to becoming teachers been shaped by their racial and gender identity? 2) How do they conceptualize the teaching profession and what has motivated them to pursue that career? and 3) Why do they believe there are so few Latino teachers and what are strategies for recruiting more? The emerging themes for the first research question were Negative School Experiences (Interactions with administration and Reprimanding Spanish) and Damaging School Structures (Segregated Schools and School tracking). The emerging themes for the second question were the Teacher’s Journey (Soft Exposure to Education and Peers’ suggestion), Conceptualization of Teachers (Building Relationships, Developing Citizens and Guides to the World) and Motivations for Teaching (Giving back to their Communities, Becoming Cultural Guardians). The emerging themes for the third research question were Deterrents to the Profession (Educational Negative Feedback Loop and Gender Norms) and Suggestions for Recruiting (Mending School-Student Relationships, Pipeline Programs, Teachers as Recruiters, Addressing Gender Norms and Offering Tutoring Experiences) This study offers the perspective of a highly marginalized group within the education system and their insights offer opportunities to develop effective recruitment practices and expose gaps in equity within our schooling system that must be addressed. By introducing diverse and marginalized voices to the discussion of teacher recruitment, we can begin to fully understand the complexity of the issue and can act appropriately in addressing it.