Valuing Spanish and Spanish Speakers: Regaño as Caring in a Dual Immersion Classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogical Possibilities for a Changing Public: Bi/Multilingual Latina/o Students in Urban Schools

Abstract

This paper theorizes the linguistic practices of a fifth grade teacher in a dual immersion school who identifies as an immigrant and an English language learner (ELL). Maestra Segura (a pseudonym) draws upon her own cultural linguistic practices to teach her students to respect each other’s linguistic knowledge and cultural understanding, particularly that of the Spanish-dominant students.

In this Spanish/English bilingual classroom, Maestra Segura made strategic decisions to privilege the Spanish language and organized learning activities in such a way where students learned from and alongside their peers to develop a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) in this classroom. One of the linguistic tools she used is regaño, meaning “to scold” in Spanish, but which she employed as a form of critical care (Antrop-González and De Jesus, 2006). In these instances, Maestra Segura insisted on the best from her students in terms of engagement with each other in collaborative learning activities, and respect for each other’s linguistic knowledge. This type of demonstrated care (Nieto, 2008) falls under the idea of educación (Valenzuela, 1999), which in addition to traditional notions of education, also “provides instructions on how one should live in the world” (p. 21).

This paper draws from a year-long qualitative study of a dual immersion school in southern California. The study focused on two fifth grade classrooms, examining the linguistic interactions in both the Spanish and English language arts blocks. Using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Rymes, 2009), I examine four video clips taken in one of the classrooms, focused on activities that depended on students co-constructing knowledge with a peer, rather than depending on the teacher, Maestra Segura, for information.

Data sources included 1-hour videos of the language arts blocks in both English and Spanish twice a week for 16 weeks, as well as field notes written about each observation to complement the video taken and inform the analysis.

The four video clips of interactions in Maestra Segura’s classroom illustrate the teacher’s ability to pull from multiple linguistic and academic funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005) of the traditionally silenced linguistic minority students. As a predominantly Spanish-speaker herself, Maestra Segura drew on her own language background, as well as her students’ cultural resources, to engage the students in building a multilingual community of practice. These class activities resulted in students from English-language backgrounds valuing their Spanish-speaking peers, as they interacted in activities requiring knowledge of the Spanish language.

Implications include recognizing the need to incorporate students’ diverse language backgrounds and abilities into the curriculum, as well as deliberately developing language arts activities that call on knowledge from linguistic minority peers, in an attempt to value languages other than English in the classroom. Additionally, lessons can be drawn from teachers who share cultural and linguistic practices with their students for their larger school communities to learn from.

Author

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago