"I Feel It's Not About Ability, It's About Power": Interpretations of a Gentrifying Two-Way Bilingual Education Program

• In Event: Gentrification and Dual-Language Bilingual Education: A Texas Two-Way Bilingual Education School Across Seven Years

Abstract

Objectives: The teachers in this paper are all from the Texas/Mexico borderlands which played a role in how they drew from their bilingual experiences as Latinas and educators to make sense of a gentrifying two-way immersion dual language bilingual education (TWBE). The profile of each teacher includes a description of their bilingual identity in addition to selected data to demonstrate how they were interpreting the implementation of a TWBE program. The following question guided my analysis: How do Latina teachers' bilingual experiences shape their interpretation of a new TWBE program? How do their interpretations shape the language learning experiences of students in their class?
Perspectives: Gloria Anzaldua (1987) described the concept of border thinking when an individual recollects an experience from the borderlands in order to make sense of a new experience, whether it is positive or negative. The bilingual moments teachers in this study describe while growing up in the borderlands are used to understand their connections to a pedagogy of border thinking (Author & Redacted, 2016) in a rapidly gentrifying TWBE program. When teachers use a pedagogy of border thinking they are attempting to delink from colonial ways of knowing and in a bilingual classroom this includes unique ways of language learning.
Methods & Data Sources: The author draws from data collected in a multi-case study over four years as she followed the original kindergarten student cohort that started in this newly implemented TWBE program. She explores how four teachers (K - 3rd grade) implemented the TWBE model for the first time. Data in this study includes video/audio recordings, teacher interviews, and field notes in each classroom (K – 3rd grade) which were collected for a period of 6-8 consecutive weeks each academic school year.
Results/conclusions: Each teacher drew from their borderland and bilingual experiences in unique ways. The pedagogical decisions each teacher made was connected to their bilingual identity and experiences in the borderlands. The kindergarten teacher straddled the tension to maintain “fidelity” to the TWBE model by speaking mostly in Spanish, but allowing room in her classroom for students to translanguage. The first grade teacher drew from her border identity and experiences to translanguage during content area instruction which created opportunities for her students to also draw from their full linguistic repertoire. The remaining teachers opened up opportunities to use multicultural children’s literature to center the experiences of racialized bilingual students in their classroom while candidly sharing about their own bilingual identities and experiences in the borderlands with young children. All teachers worked hard as they navigated a rapidly changing school and they all wanted to support the development of bilingualism and bilingual identities as best they could.

Scholarly Significance: Implications for critical bilingual teacher education programs include the importance in centering the backgrounds, whether positive or negative, of racialized bilingual teachers. When racialized teachers are able to reflect on their borderlands experiences, they learn ways to share about them in empowering and culturally sustaining ways for culturally and linguistically diverse contexts like the TWBE classroom.

Author

• Suzanne García, California State University - Monterey Bay
  Presenting Author