Binational Pedagogy Implementation: Transborder Visits as Clinical Practice for Binational Teachers

• In Event: Formadores de Docentes: A Binational Teacher Education Project at the U.S./Mexico Border

Abstract

This paper reports on the transborder teaching experience of bilingual teacher candidates from two California universities and the teacher educators that prepare them. Participation in this transborder experience involved planning and teaching in a school in Baja California, Mexico as part of the curricular design and implementation of the Formadores de Docentes Project. Specifically, by looking at data from the pilot year of the curricular implementation, authors will share themes from the study that illustrate how individuals in the program reflected on the interactions and activities that informed their understandings of the binational context. These themes also highlight the challenges and/ or tensions experienced by bilingual teacher candidates as they learned about policy and practice, and teaching and learning on both sides of the border.

We draw on a “Transnational Education Framework” that integrates four contextual dimensions that the literature suggests shape binational students’ schooling experiences: sociopolitical, sociocultural, sociolinguistic, and socioemotional (Author, 2019), while proposing a multi-dimensional binational education framework that considers these dimensions and their connectedness in the binational educational context.

Using ethnographic field methods, we document the work of a group of binational teacher educators as they developed and implemented a binational curriculum over 18 months. We draw on ethnography as a way to trace how interactions among group members evolve over time across a range of activities and spaces (Shore & Wright, 1997). Specifically, we utilized ethnographic observations during collaborative team meetings and school visits, artifact analysis, and interviews. The data sources primarily utilized for this paper include 1) survey responses from teacher candidates from Fall 2018 pertaining to baseline understandings of sociocultural, sociopolitical, sociolinguistic, and socioemotional dimensions of binational education, the U.S. and Mexican education systems, and cross-cultural knowledge; 2) course assignment reflections written in response to the four dimensions of binational education and a transborder visit; and 3) focus groups with audio-recordings of teacher educators’ experiences with the transborder visit to capture their professional learning surrounding binational pedagogy implementation.

Through the implementation of a binational teacher education curriculum across institutions on both sides of the U.S. and Mexico border, this paper reports findings on the impact of a binational curriculum and the transborder visit on teacher candidates’ understanding and pedagogical skills that will support them in better serving binational students. In addition to amplifying teacher candidates’ voices as they negotiate the four contextual dimensions of binational education, the paper highlights the teacher educators’ reflections on how the project overall and the transborder visits specifically impacted their professional growth as binational teacher educators. This study is significant because it reports on how university students were impacted by the curricular design and transborder field experience integrated into two traditional bilingual teacher education programs in San Diego and how teacher educators were also professionally developed by the experience. This study provides insight to similar programs that serve binational students.

Authors

• Sera Jean Hernandez, San Diego State University

• Alberto Esquinca, San Diego State University

• Veronica Gonzalez, California State University - Los Angeles