Beginning from the border

TESOL Quarterly, 2020

2018

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Drawing from a larger qualitative study, this paper examines the professional and personal narratives of over 50 Latina/o preservice educators preparing to teach in bilingual classrooms across Texas. In particular, we examine the preservice teachers' language ideologies as they recount their own experiences of language and literacy learning. The preservice teachers-both traditional and non-traditional college students-are overwhelmingly female and Latina with varying levels of bilingualism. Participants come from various immigrant backgrounds: long-term Tejanas, bordertown second-generation Mexican-Americans, Fronterizas who grew up on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, Mexican nationals, South American immigrants, Puertorriqueñas, and self-identified Chicanas. We find that our preservice bilingual teachers are bilingual and bi-dialectical and that their ways of speaking have often incurred the violence of authority figures. In addition, we find that the teachers' own language ideologies can reflect dominant ideologies that denigrate the varieties of Spanish that deviate from the institutional standard.

Bilingual teachers’ professional identity inquiry may open up possibilities for agency and equality in U.S. dual language contexts. Deploying Borderland, Agency, and Position theories, this article narrates the life histories of three nepantlera Chicanx/Latinx dual language bilingual tea- chers—Jessica, Roberto, and Marta—who work in different English-Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) schools in a Midwestern city. Jessica self- identified as Chicana and the other two participants as Latinos. The purpose of the study was to examine the complexity of these teachers’ professional identity development and their possibilities for agency within nepantla— their negotiating of their linguistic and cultural identities as English- or Spanish-only teachers in a dual language program with a strict language separation model. Data included three life history interviews with each participant over four months. Findings suggest possibilities for teachers’ assertion of their silenced bilingual voices, for reclaiming their linguistic and cultural identities, and for further developing their “bilingual pedagogical noticing,” as well as conscious leveraging of their aesthetic and deeply personal understanding of themselves—of nepantla—to assert more holis- tic bilingual and bicultural identities in DLI programs. Through sociopolitical consciousness and the leveraging of educators’ and students’ identities, the context for teaching and learning can be (re)imagined to allow for (re) presenting teachers’ fuller, holistic professional identities and for opening up potential spaces for agency.

International Multilingual Research Journal, 2018

Bilingual teachers' professional identity inquiry may open up possibilities for agency and equality in U.S. dual language contexts. Deploying Borderland, Agency, and Position theories, this article narrates the life histories of three nepantlera Chicanx/Latinx dual language bilingual teachers-Jessica, Roberto, and Marta-who work in different English-Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) schools in a Midwestern city. Jessica selfidentified as Chicana and the other two participants as Latinos. The purpose of the study was to examine the complexity of these teachers' professional identity development and their possibilities for agency within nepantlatheir negotiating of their linguistic and cultural identities as English-or Spanish-only teachers in a dual language program with a strict language separation model. Data included three life history interviews with each participant over four months. Findings suggest possibilities for teachers' assertion of their silenced bilingual voices, for reclaiming their linguistic and cultural identities, and for further developing their "bilingual pedagogical noticing," as well as conscious leveraging of their aesthetic and deeply personal understanding of themselves-of nepantla-to assert more holistic bilingual and bicultural identities in DLI programs. Through sociopolitical consciousness and the leveraging of educators' and students' identities, the context for teaching and learning can be (re)imagined to allow for (re) presenting teachers' fuller, holistic professional identities and for opening up potential spaces for agency. KEYWORDS Agency; bilingual pedagogical noticing; bilingual teachers; linguistic and cultural identities; professional identity The fast-growing trend of implementing English-Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) or two-way (TWI) immersion programs (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2012) in the United States attends to the promise of providing bilingualism and biliteracy for all students but also of addressing the considerable achievement and opportunity gap currently affecting emergent bilingual 1 students nationwide (Rueda & Stillman, 2012). The Midwest, along with the South, represent some of the fastest-growing areas of Latinx students in the country (Ennis, Rios-Vargas, & Albert, 2011). In the last 10 years, in the state of Wisconsin alone, 12 districts have adopted DLI programs, both 50/50 and 90/10 models, in about 68 schools (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2017). A common approach to bilingualism within these DLI programs includes strict language separation, a practice criticized for marking teachers' and students' linguistic identities as speakers of only English or Spanish (Lee, Hill-Bonnet, & Gillispie, 2008) that "reflects some of the same ideologies of linguistic purism that undergird English only instructional models" (Martínez, Hikida, & Durán,

Journal of Latinos and Education, 2019

In 1940s America, along the Texas-Mexico border, las escuelitasor little schoolswere places Mexican American parents sent their young children to begin their academic learning. These escuelitas, however, were no ordinary schools. They did not teach students to read, write, and speak in English. Rather, they sought to develop, maintain and celebrate the linguistic and cultural heritage of the communities they served by teaching students a Mexican inspired curriculum exclusively in Spanish. Through narrative inquiry, we explore the escuelitas, as experienced and recounted by nine former escuelita students, as sites of negotiation, agency, and resistance. Drawing on theories of Third Space and nepantla, we explore the ways in which the escuelitas participants take up/put to use the knowledge they acquired at the escuelitas to enact third spaces in order to navigate hegemonic institutions. We underscore the complexity of these experiences by contextualizing the escuelitas historically.

This position paper describes the educational situation facing retornado families and children, Mexican transnational immigrants moving between the New York City region and Puebla, Mexico. Following an overview of issues in transnational migration and education, we describe factors underlying the current lack of adequate first language and second language instruction for the Spanish-English bilinguals returning to live in Mexico. We offer suggestions for how Mexican educators can better serve transnational bilingual students through instruction, taking into account the views of parents and the need for teacher education that contemplates the specific linguistic, cultural, and academic needs of returning immigrant children.

Equity Perspectives and Restrictionist Policies: Tensions in Dual Language Bilingual Education, 2019

Amidst the current climate surrounding bilingual education in the U.S., this study looked critically at the ways language education policies informed bilingual education as language was constructed and performed in a dual language bilingual, Spanish-English, third-grade classroom. This four-year ethnographic study explored the hegemonic realities of TWDLI classrooms and the role language played in affording and restricting the types of talk that occurred. Two primary findings were: (1) the tensions embedded in contexts of language and power gave way to restrictionist policies that both protected and constrained the types of talk that occurred; and (2) translanguaging manifested during both dominant language instruction as well as unrestricted spontaneous language events as participants exercised agentive power while negotiating both covert and over policies through resistance capitals.