Embodied Rescriptings in Ethnography: Critical Performance Ethnography Rehearsing Advocacy in Bilingual Education

• In Event: 66.015 - "With and For" Not "On" or "About": Engaging the Limits of Education Research for Movement-Building

Abstract

As a critical educator/researcher interested in the formation of future teachers I understand my commitment needs to extend to both academia and the community as we look for ways to do engaged research against the grain. The infusion of performance in critical ethnography provides an additional and complimentary lens that privileges the embodied knowledge of the community members, the ethnographers and the audience in our own culture/identity making. This productive vulnerability of self-reflexivity allows the researcher to be in horizontal dialogue with the community members; thus putting ourselves in line with the messiness, the same way they put themselves on the line by sharing their lives.

Using as a backdrop a study on the pedagogical implementation of Forum Theater (Boal, 2000) in the bilingual teacher preparation classroom in Texas to explore socio-cultural and raciolinguistic issues utilizing minoritized languages, the author examines her roles as “co-performance witnesses” (Madison, 2007) and discusses issues related to community accountability and openness about advocacy, self-reflexivity and positionality, and bodily engagement in the research of all the parties involved in the research. Forum Theater in a translanguaging space (Wei, 2011) provided the 22 participants with the tools to “play the game” as they rehearsed their future stance while using Spanglish. This study calls for preparing bilingual teachers willing to redefine “the game” both inside and outside the classroom—for instance, in curriculum design, language policy, mentorship.

Critical performance ethnography provides a nuanced picture of the emergent advocacy identity of the participants as they rehearsed their new voices as they verbalized, but principally mobilized their stances while translanguaging (Garcia, 2009). This kind of research methodology allowed all the community to engage and reflect on the disruption of the hegemony of English in the ivory tower by privileging the use of stigmatized intimate language practices for academic and professional purposes.

Author

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities