Critical Caring Against Backlash Pedagogy: Teachers as Activists in the New York State Spanish Spelling Bee

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Vulnerability and Care in Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper explores the way teacher participants in the New York State Spanish Spelling Bee work the hyphen as teacher-activists in their ways of rallying for their students of Latin American descent. Findings of this two-year ethnographically oriented case study point to the way teachers carve spaces for political action as they advocate for cultural citizenship and visibility for their students through the spelling competition. The analysis draws from Valenzuela’s (1999) concept of teacher caring to suggest new understandings of caring under the current regime of backlash pedagogy (Gutiérrez & Tejeda, 2005) understood in this paper as a set of discourses that blame the educational crisis on culturally and linguistically diverse children.

Author

• Carmina Makar, City College of New York - CUNY