New Paradigms and Familiar Contexts: A Border Pedagogy for Latinx Preservice Teachers

• In Event: 51.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 51.078-3 - Forging an HSI Identity: Institutionally Supported Research and the Meaning of "Hispanic-Serving"

Abstract

As we develop a mission and vision of our HSI identity as a College of Education, within the border, we envision the pedagogical practices that are context specific and promote strong values and characters in our students as they prepare to become teachers. The conversation around diversity and equity has been salient in bilingual education as teacher educators strive to center communities’ cultural and linguistic resources (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992). More recently, the dialogue has turned inward as researchers more closely examine bilingual teacher education itself (Flores, Sheets & Clark, 2011; Ramirez, Faltis & de Jong, 2018). We concur with our colleagues who call for critical and transformational teacher education for bilingual communities drawing attention to identity, ideology, language, and culture. We extend those ideas to include a centralizing of the geopolitical, sociocultural, and linguistic spaces where teaching and learning take place.
Based on these ideals, we implemented a meta-analysis to integrate relevant results from qualitative, quantitative, and theoretical research (Ke, 2009; Sandelowski & Barroso, 2006; Tyree & Hill, 2016). Here, this inductive methodology builds on a broader understanding of the theory and practice of teaching on the U.S-Mexico border. We began with broad fields of inquiry; identified potential studies; reviewed each study; used their citations to broaden the search; compiled categories of the relevant studies; then distilled the findings into overarching structures, concepts, content, and practices. The results build on theories of border pedagogy to understand research on preparing bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural teachers who serve borderland communities.
The emergent themes included specific factors to be considered in border pedagogies for teacher preparation, which include teacher identity, culturally relevant pedagogies for the teacher candidates and their future students, the context of the borderlands and bilingual education. We also found specific relationships between the different nested contextual levels: U.S. socio-political factors, the history of PK-12 schools in the borderlands, and Latinx teacher preparation within borderland communities.
An increasingly diverse K-12 student population has foregrounded culturally relevant and sustainable pedagogy (Paris, 2012) in colleges of education across the U.S., especially in the reality of a mostly white, English-dominant, middle-class, and female national teacher corps (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Nieto, 2000; Paris, 2012). These are important issues to be addressed. As teacher educators at a large HSI on the U.S.-Mexico border, our teacher candidates go on to teach in the same K-12 schools they attended. As K-12 students, they lived through oppressive schooling structures that devalued their cultural and linguistic identities; as teachers, they will soon be teaching within those same structures. Our goal is to broaden our current approach to teacher education beyond teaching methods and theory to include a more holistic approach that situates methods and theory into a specific context. These border pedagogies for Latinx preservice teachers can serve as the foundation of culturally relevant and sustainable pedagogies for all teacher preparation in Hispanic Serving Institutions.

Authors

• Kip Austin Hinton, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• Christian Ellen Zuniga, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley

• Alcione N. Ostorga, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley