The Personal Is Professional: Teaching and Learning in the Intersticios

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Identities and Educational Justice

Abstract

The purpose of this autoethnography is to examine the researcher’s experiences as Latina, Spanish-language teacher in a majority Latinx high school in Southern California. Authoethnographic methodology has allowed the researcher, through the investigation of her own identity as a teacher, to reinterpret the own private experiences in a collective context. Guided by borderlands epistemology (Anzaldúa, 2007; Elenes, 2006; Sandoval, 2000), the researcher analyzed eight years of journals that spanned her teaching and graduate school career, to examine the extent to which her own multiple identities informed her teaching. The researcher found that her identity as a graduate student, instead of being oppositional to her teaching identity, was complementary and helped facilitate her own development throughout her teaching career.

Author

• Rosemary Hendriks, California State University - Los Angeles