Monographs on teacher.. 9808 v5 - Umeå universitet

had been dormant during this period of low immigration, and thushad to be reconstructed new, when significant levels of immigrationresumed after the war. These programs differed from previous languageeducation programs because they were sparked by Federal funding, andmodeled their rationales on the discourse of the funding programsavailable to them.Among the earliest of these programs were the two-way bilingualeducation programs provided in South Florida for Cuban refugeesfleeing Fidel Castro’s socialist society. As can be expected, many of therefugees coming out of Fidel’s Cuba were society’s elites. Since Cubahad been an economically and racially stratified society, those peoplewho had the motivation and the resources to leave Cuba were similarin crucial ways to elite groups in the United States— they were wealthy,highly educated, and largely ”White.” In other words, they were initiallyperceived 5 as fitting the image of Brimelow’s exceptional immigrants,who could come into this country and take on its characteristics withoutthreatening either its identity, or its economic structure.The early educational programs designed to serve the needs ofCuban students were drawn from the image of the exceptional, orbenign immigrant. These programs were funded, along with a numberof other elite programs in math, science, and foreign languages bymoney provided by the National Defense Education Act (NDEA)which was intended to train future intellectual elites, and operatedunder the slogan of ”Education for excellence.” (See Kaestle and Smith,1982.)These programs were initially developed then, within the frameworkof what Ruiz (1984) calls a ”language as resource” orientation,based on the assumption that Cuban students could help teach Spanishto their English speaking peers through two-way bilingual education.Naturally, these programs were largely implemented in upper-incomeneighborhoods, such as Coral Gables, a wealthy Miami suburb.Discussions of such programs were framed in terms of the immigrantstudents providing valued skills and intellectual resources to their hostcommunities. For example, administrators in one such program in theMiami area, proclaimed, describing the benefits of their bilingual programfor English and Spanish speakers alike, that their graduates would”have skills, abilities and understandings which will greatly extend [their]233