DREAMing of STEM: Testimonio as a Means to Prepare Future Bilingual Teachers

• In Event: DREAMers, Immigrant Rights Advocates, and Allies: Strategic Engagements to Expand PK–16+ Public Education

Abstract

Through our collective work to prepare teachers of bilingual students, we –several university faculty members--wanted our teacher candidates (TCs) to gain a sense of urgency towards the barriers legal status may play in education. We wanted our TCs to understand their own students as more than simply working towards bilingualism, and to understand the complexity faced by students and families navigating the US immigration system. As such, we invited Dario M.L., a first-generation college student in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), to share part of his journey with our TCs. so that they could see what happens when a child’s curiosity in STEM has been nurtured, and to see how this youthful passion can carry forward into adulthood. We saw Dario as an exemplar of what can happen when young learners have their curiosity supported by their teachers, and we wanted this to serve as a call to action for our TCs.

We offered Dario’s talk with our TCs as a form of testimonio, a purposefully first-person “narration of urgency” (Jara, 1986), with the intentional use of “I” to speak directly to the listeners. The use of testimonio is deliberately intended to both engage and provoke the audience to react in different ways, ideally leading to changes of some kind.
We invited Dario to share his testimonio with about three dozen bilingual TCs, because he and many of the TCs in the audience were contemporaries sharing many of the same frames of reference. As bilingual teachers, many had experienced culture shock and the challenges of learning a new language, but what made Dario’s testimonio particularly valuable was that most of the audience had operated with the many privileges associated with being documented.
Dario’s presentation, which included accounts of his life in Mexico before coming to the US, some of his familial funds of knowledge related to STEM, his homesickness, and his complex interactions with the US legal system, elicited a powerful reaction from the audience, ranging from outrage and sorrow to optimism and re-doubled dedication to our collective labor as teachers. Through in-the-moment reactions and through written reflections gathered from the participants later, it was clear that those assembled were struck by Dario’s candor in spite of the risk he bore in revealing his undocumented status. These reflections from the participants, along with notes and remarks Dario provided, served as the primary data sources for this work.

An implication of Dario’s narrative is a call for educators to become more informed about immigrant rights. In this era of increasing violence against immigrants and people of color, we are called to find ways to foreground the voices of those historically silenced and excluded from the bigger narrative. We offer this work as an appeal to our broader humanity, in which the inspired ideal of making a difference becomes reality. Dario’s testimonio is a rich account of an individual typically silenced in the college setting, providing a narrative which can be used in a variety of educational environments.

Authors

• Anita Bright, Portland State University

• G. Sue Kasun, Georgia State University