"Our Hearts Beat Faster": Performing the Advocate Bilingual Teacher for Future Story-Making in the Borderlands

• In Event: 21.020 - Reimagining Intellectualism: Challenging Academia to Sustain Pluralistic Productions of Knowledge

Abstract

This study examines how 22 Mexican-American/Latinx preservice teachers make sense of the complexity of the issues pertaining to bilingual education in connection with their identities as emerging bilingual teachers-advocates through the performances of real-life stories from the bilingual classroom using Theater of the Oppressed techniques (Boal, 2000). The reenactments were conducive to a critical understanding of the sociocultural and raciolinguistic influences in bilingual education while rehearsing their new roles as advocates. As part of her role as “co- performance witness” (Madison, 2007), the researcher will present her fieldwork and findings as a public performance using performance ethnographic tools (Conquergood, 1995; Jones, 2002; Madison, 2007) to engage in issues related to community accountability, open advocacy, self- reflexivity and positionality.
Performance ethnography provides a different lens centered in the body as source of knowledge, experience, meaning, and cultural production. Performance ethnography moves away from scriptocentrism (Conquergood, 1991; Madison, 2011), which fails to encompass the nuances and complexities of practices that do not pertain to the written world. Madison (2007) extends the centrality of the body in the performance ethnography to the researcher, calling them “co- performative witness” in that they live dialogically with the participants within their spaces and their struggles at a certain point of their socio-cultural context. Placing the researcher’s body on the line with the messiness aligns with notions of relational accountability (Wilson, 2008) to the community as partners in research (Jones, 2002).
The public performance will provide an account of the participants’ reenactments of counterstories as they became advocates on the stage and on their terms using their performances—captured through video recordings—participants’ reflections, and semistructured conversations (Alim, 2004). Fieldnotes provide commentary to recreate the fleeting moments of witnessing captured during the participants’ reenactments. I choose to place all the aforementioned texts in a one-person ethnodrama (Saldaña, 2011) to represent how advocacy was imagined and constituted among the participants through embodiment and creativity. The dialogical nature of this methodology and the public performance take into account the following elements: witnessing, community accountability, self-reflexivity, audience engagement and open advocacy (Jones, 2015; Schechner, 1993).
Through the reenactments (called “Casos de la Vida Real”), the participants had the opportunity to become teacher advocates on the stage and experiment in the flesh how it feels like to take a stand in scenarios that may occur in their future schools. The participants had the reins to control the outcomes of the reenactments and the emotions that prevented them from being assertive, showing poise, and opening dialogue. This allowed them to become strategic to “play the game” (Urrieta, 2009), which in turn, shifted their views of what advocacy looks like. Moreover, the participants showed emergent advocacy outside the classroom, speaking up for language rights and bilingual education for minoritized students with peers, relatives, and community parents.
This study calls for the rethinking of teacher preparation programs to prepare future teachers for the realities and demands of educating Mexican-American/Latinx emergent bilingual students as well as an awareness of the socio-political climate that invokes anti-immigration, linguicist, and racist discourses.

Author

• Blanca Caldas, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities