The Practice of Cariño for Emergent Bilingual Students: Latinx Students in the United States and Indigenous Guatemaltecos

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Transforming Schooling for Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices

Abstract

Purposes
Cariño (“care”) has been discussed as a theoretical construct by scholars to illuminate the actions and practices of bilingual Latinx teachers through this lens. We trace the history of this idea and provide examples from our empirical work, where we observed cariño being enacted by Latina pedagogues.

Framework
Latinx scholars examining bilingual contexts have used the term cariño (Bartolomé, 2008; Curry, 2016; Duncan-Andrade, 2006; Nieto, 2000) to invoke cultural ideas included in educación and Spanish-speaking, bilingual classrooms. We define cariño as a teacher’s demonstrated understanding of students’ political and racialized realities through an authentic love for the students and the students’ communities, evidenced through high academic expectations, and advocacy on behalf of the students and the students’ communities (Author, 2017).

Method
We provide two examples from qualitative studies in bilingual classrooms, the first conducted in the U.S. at the elementary level in a Spanish/English dual immersion school, and the second in a Latin American context at the secondary level where both Spanish and an indigenous Mayan language were used for instruction. The first study focused on the instruction of a fifteen-year veteran teacher (Maestra Segura) in southern California whose instruction was 50% in English and 50% in Spanish. The second study examined the bilingual and intercultural curriculum of the teacher education institution in Guatemala predominantly serving the indigenous community of the western highlands.

Data sources
The first study took place over the course of one academic year (2009-10) where the first author videotaped the classroom of Maestra Segura for sixteen weeks, as well as wrote field notes over the course of the school year. Data collection in the second study included field notes based on classroom observations of the psychology teacher in 2014-15 and interviews with the instructor, Seño Aura.

Results
In Maestra Segura’s classroom, she displayed affection to her students by using terms such as mi amor (“my love”), but also enacted the linguistic practice of regaño (“scolding”) to urge her Spanish-speaking students to contribute during Spanish time. She held rigorous standards for engagement for all of her students, but had particular expectations for her emergent bilinguals. In a postsecondary bilingual classroom in an indigenous community where students were learning to become bilingual teachers themselves, Seño Aura enacted a curriculum of urgency (Author, 2017). Through pedagogical moves that highlighted and valued the community knowledge that students held, the instructor urged students to value and continue their indigenous cultural ways of living, or understand that they would be lost forever. This curriculum of urgency is rooted in the political context of the marginalization of the indigenous in Guatemala and in the hopes by the faculty and administration for a continued collective and indigenous future.

Significance
Displays of regaño resulted from Maestra Segura’s high academic expectations for her students, while the curriculum of urgency was a result of Seño Aura’s of cultural loss. Both educators demonstrated an understanding of the sociopolitical positioning of their students in their respective contexts, as Spanish-speakers in California and as indigenous people in Guatemala.

Authors

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Lydia A Saravia, University of Illinois at Chicago