Spaces of Resistance, Hope, and Justice: Centering the Foundational Goal of Critical Consciousness at Hillside

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

Abstract

Objectives
This paper highlights how a fifth-grade DLBE teacher (Author 2) at Hillside prioritized the actions of critical consciousness in her engagement with students and parents in her classroom amidst rapid gentrification.

Theoretical perspectives
Critical scholars have pointed to the marginalization of the epistemologies, language practices, and desires of racially and linguistically minoritized stakeholders in DLBE contexts (Authors, 2017; Flores et al., 2021). These contexts are also more prone to gentrification processes that contribute to this marginalization through colonial discourses, ideologies, and practices that both geographically displace and metaphorically replace these same epistemologies, language practices, and desires (Blanton et al., 2021; Delavan et al., 2021; Dorner et al., 2021). Concrete responses that look to counter, historicize, and critically listen to gentrification processes in DLBE contexts are essential sites of learning and actions to potentially challenge these same gentrification processes (Delavan et al., in press; Dorner et al., in press; Poza & Stites, 2022). We document Author 2’s pedagogical, curricular, and relational response to gentrification at Hillside that placed critical conscious at the core of her teaching practice.

Methods
Author 1 carried out a schoolwide critical ethnography at Hillside in 2015-2016 focused on gentrification processes and how key stakeholders were making sense of these same processes. Author 2, who was explicitly challenging gentrification at the school, became the focal point of the research due to her pedagogical, curricular, and relational commitment to equity, justice, and praxis.

Data sources
Data sources include interviews with Author 2 and her presentation in Author 1’s university course with future bilingual teachers, Author 1’s field notes, and an interview with three students in Author 2’s fifth-grade class.

Results
Results highlight how Author 2 placed critical consciousness at the core of her pedagogy, curriculum, and relationships with parents (Author et al., in press). Through the centering of the ways of being and knowing of working-class parents and students, a parent-led lesson around tamale-making generated opportunities to engage with the actions of critical consciousness: historicizing tamale-making, critically listening to oftentimes marginalized epistemologies, interrogating the neoliberal logic of procedural texts, acompanamiento in communion with those parents and students, and varying engagements with discomfort. While Author 2’s centering of these actions and deep care for working-class parents and students did offer a hopeful example of the transformative possibilities of a DLBE classroom, findings revealed that countering gentrification was not a priority at the schoolwide level at Hillside.

Scholarly Significance
Due to rapid growth and gentrification processes in DLBE at the levels of policy, programming, and the community (Delavan et al., 2021), we argue that there is an urgency to counter these processes through critical listening, interrogating power, historicizing DLBE and the community, taking action, and accompanying that same community. Author 2’s epistemological break (Mignolo, 2007 ) from Eurocentric architectures and knowledges that structure curriculum and instruction (Fregoso Bailon & De Lissovoy, 2019 ) through a parent-led tamale making lesson around procedural texts reveals the transformative possibilities of DLBE spaces when critical consciousness is a foundational goal.

Authors

• Dan Heiman, University of Texas - El Paso
  Presenting Author

• Michelle Yanes, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author