Shifting Discourses: Performing the Advocate Bilingual Teacher

• In Event: Roundtable Session 55
  In Roundtable Session: Negotiating Issues of Power, Race, and Culture Within Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper analyses the co-construction of the bilingual teacher as advocate among preservice bilingual teacher through the use of narratives of actual stories of bilingual teachers by means of drama-based pedagogy inspired by Theater of the Oppressed techniques. This study use critical discourse analysis and Bakhtinian intertextuality to analyze the way bilingual preservice teachers shifted discourses from discussing issues pertaining to bilingual education—race and immigration—as outsiders to be situated in the middle of conflict as protagonists. The improvisational nature of the performance allowed the participation of the students in the figured world of bilingual teachers.

Author

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas, The University of Texas - Austin