Ruiz, Richard (1948-)

Richard Ruiz is a highly respected authority and leader in language planning in education. He is best known for his framework on language orientations, which examines people's views of language difference: language-as-problem, language-as-right, and language-as-resource. Since its conception in the late 1970s, this framework has been influential among education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers around the world. Ruiz's life and career are described in this entry.

Ruiz was born on December 31, 1948, in Mesa, Arizona, to Guadalupe and Prudencio Ruiz. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, with his parents and seven siblings. The parents, from a humble background, worked in the agricultural fields, and young Ruiz himself harvested alongside his family during the summer months, picking cotton in Arizona and fruits and vegetables in the farms of the Santa Clara Valley of California.

His early experiences traveling between Arizona and California taught him to adapt to changing community and schooling situations. The family eventually settled in the San Jose, California, area, where he attended junior high school and high school. His native language was Spanish, but he learned English at a young age. His English literacy was gained at school, but his Spanish literacy was learned by reading the Bible in Spanish during church services and other religious events.

Motivated by the support of a school counselor, Ruiz applied to and was accepted into Harvard University in the mid-1960s. There he obtained his BA in Romance languages and literatures and became proficient in two additional languages, French and Italian. He was among the first cohort of Mexican American students to graduate from Harvard University. While living in the Boston area, he met Marie Lorusso, who later became his wife. For his graduate studies, he attended Stanford University, where he earned his PhD in philosophy of education in 1980.

His interdisciplinary studies in anthropology, education, and philosophy of science exerted a strong intellectual influence on Ruiz, leading him to develop the language framework he published as “Orientations in Language Planning” in the National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE) Journal in 1984. This article, published when he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, differentiated between three ideological orientations that educational policymakers tend to have when creating language policies. The first orientation, language-as-problem, views students' linguistic diversity as an obstacle to be overcome, and the educational solution is to teach either incrementally, through transitional bilingual education, or exclusively in the majority language. The second, opposing orientation, language-as-right, views language as a basic human right, independent of the social or economic status that language may have outside the social spheres where that language is spoken. The third orientation, related to the second, is language-as-resource. Through these prisms, according to Ruiz, policymakers interpret the need for particular approaches to bilingual education and to the teaching of English. There is little crossover between these views. Practitioners tend to rely on one of these views to help them fashion programs that include the teaching of minority native languages in schools, especially for language minority students. Ruiz argues that viewing language as a resource can alleviate conflict between language minority and language majority communities and enhance the status of subordinate languages. Although the first two orientations are embedded in divisiveness and hostility, the third orientation, Ruiz's main theoretical contribution, allows for a more comprehensive and respectful approach to language planning.

...