Explorando y Empujando Borders and the In-Between in a Public, Early Childhood Education, Summer School Program

• In Event: 34.095 - MTCC Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: 34.095-3 - The Sociopolitical of Latinx Education: Problemas, Promesas, y Posibilidades in an Era of Anti-Latinx Racism

Abstract

This paper presents narratives co-constructed by activist playworkers and researchers in a public early learning summer program, mandated by the state as an “ESL” summer school, but reconceptualized by the authors as a play- and inquiry-based exploration of self, other and the world designed to implement problem-solving skills learned at home in a school setting -- constructing school peronas that position students as powerful, capable and skilled community-members.

Objective/Purpose
Our narratives showcase how truth, especially truths about minoritarian ways of being, including emerging bilingualism, are constructed, narrated, maintained and amplified by faculty, peers, self and other. Presently, where truth-claims consolidate power through fear of what lies on the Other side of various borders and boundaries, what does our search for truth as activist researchers in a border state bring into focus?

Modes of Inquiry
We participate in this curriculum, then utilize a form of ‘collective biography’ (Davies et al., 2013) to narrate and connect stories to sociohistorical, geopolitical and cultural realities.

Evidence
We emphasize two tones of narration generated from our experience within this curriculum: Despair and Hope.

1. Despair: In our collective biographical explorations of the narratives we take-up, forecast, capture and mine we return to the deft discernment of “difference” and its use in narrative play to codify ‘other’ in scenarios that result from our “Constructive Play Lab” (Kinard, Gainer, & Huerta, 2018)—a makers’ space utilizing recycled materials. Characters in one of these narratives are the words of a 7-year-old boy and two younger friends, monolingual and white: “If I hear one more kid speaking Spanish, there’s going to be a war.” “Yeah….” “That’s right.” “…A war.”

2. Hope: As we seek to find hope in an(other) post-hope era, we have been taken-up by our collective narration of the normalization of linguistic difference over a longitudinal school project in which the bright borders between languages in Texas become transgressed through a purposeful lean into linguistic borders. Four years after the bellicose quotes above were uttered, we have begun to narrate stories about slow, flowing movement away from stratified linguistic ‘areas’ toward joined play in our school, still with linguistic stratifications that maintain a dominance, but with a flux.

Conclusions
While these narratives could be encountered as a binary with poles named Hope and Despair, we present them in order to explore the spaces in-between, frontiers in the problems marrying critical pedagogical approaches in ECE with mainstream constructivist-based approaches to early learning that reify “ownership” and “choice” [read ‘Freedom’]. When the dominant culture is enacted all around, what does this dominance do to those who embody difference?

Significance
Our contribution is designed to continue the work of scholars seeking to lean into the border of self and other in schooling—to trouble identity. What does this do to our desire for ‘agency’? And what does this do to our delusions of ‘activism’? We aver that “Becoming minoritarian” [Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.118] becomes more useful than ‘agency’ in performing activism as border-crossing.

Authors

• Timothy A. Kinard, Texas State University

• Jesse Straus Gainer, Texas State University - San Marcos

• Mary Esther Huerta, Texas State University - San Marcos