Overcoming Challenges Related to Mexican Teachers' Understanding and Caring About What Happens in U.S. Schools

• In Event: Equity Across the Border: Reimagining Mexican Teacher Preparation to Meet the Needs of Transnational Students

Abstract

The twin tasks of this paper are to support the use of non-fiction fiction as a vehicle for teacher learning and to depict how binational scholarly collaboration can convert US scholars’ knowledge of US schooling into framings that Mexican teachers can both understand and operationalize. Our project assumes that US scholars of ESL, bilingual, and immigrant education know well the school and community circumstances negotiated by many Mexican transnational students before their moves to Mexico. It thus follows that they can describe challenges faced by both students and their teachers in US settings. By allowing them to fictitiously aggregate experiences that come from various research projects and experiences (leaving the underlying accounts ‘real’ but their assemblage a creative project), these experts can broach a range of issues assembled from across their career that could be relevant to Mexican teachers who are attempting to welcome and support students who were previously in the US. In other words, non-fiction fiction allows the experts to tap more of their empirically originating expertise.

But US experts, even those who know well transnational students and the US school environments that these students negotiate, often know less well the Mexican school environments that transnational students go to, the teacher preparation and in-service infrastructure that creates Mexico’s teaching force, and the ontological and epistemological framings that govern Mexican schooling. In turn, with English the dominant or exclusive language of their US-based academic careers, US experts are usually more comfortable producing advanced and nuanced manuscripts in English. It follows then that to create texts that are relevant and helpful for Mexican teachers there is a kind of two-part translation task. One is relatively straightforward, to turn text written in English to Spanish. But the involvement here of Mexican scholars of education presumes a bigger task than just literal translation, the Mexican contributors to this project also use their understanding of Mexican schools and Mexican teachers’ learning and ways to adapt the initial texts to better align with Mexican teacher expectations and ways of learning.

The broader premise of this work then is that US and Mexican scholars working collaboratively can craft a more relevant and valuable account for Mexican teachers of transnational students’ prior experiences in the US than could members of either group working without the other. The work is further informed by the application of psychological anthropology to the task of teacher change. Using epistemological taxonomies developed by Spiro (1987) and D’Andrade (1992), this work attends to the fact that Mexican teacher learning needs to be more compelling than just raising a teacher’s awareness of the prospect that they might have students who were previously in the US. Mexican teachers need to be able to imagine the world’s previously negotiated by their transnational students and be supported in considering how to operationalize their new knowledge. That is the ultimate premise of this book project.

Authors

• Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Víctor Zúñiga, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon