"Maestros, Maestras y Maestres": How Two Bilingual First-Grade Teachers Created Intersectionally Inclusive Classrooms Through Translanguaging (Poster 7)

• In Event: Case Studies of Critically Conscious Practice in Dual-Language Bilingual Education Schools, Classrooms, and Communities

Abstract

Objectives This poster looks at how a team of two first grade teachers, Sami and Molly, at a school with a Two-Way Bilingual Education (TWBE) program collaborated on the creation of inclusive classrooms for a transgender student who used non-gendered pronouns. The study examines how critical and intersectional perspectives supported the teachers in their efforts to create classrooms that were inclusive of all their students.
Overview The study found that teachers’ efforts were grounded in their experiences of marginalization in schools, as a White lesbian and a Latina respectively. While their administration, students and families, and some colleagues were supportive, other colleagues occasionally expressed or enacted oppositional stances toward their adoption of non-binary gendered language. Sami and Molly engaged in explicitly transgressive and anti-oppressive pedagogy through the incorporation of LGBTQ+ materials and lessons, the use of translanguaging, and the modification of binary language structures in English and Spanish to work toward intersectional inclusivity.
Perspectives: Sami and Molly deliberately employed critical, intersectional perspectives as they worked to queer their classrooms. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1990; Collins & Bilge, 2020), acknowledges that individuals hold multiple identities and that institutions like schools marginalize individuals whose identities differ from dominant ones. Considering the multiple matrices of power within their context, Sami and Molly labored to create classrooms that were inclusive for all their students and families. In the process, they embraced their status as learners, the partiality of their perspectives, and the uncertainty inherent in anti-oppressive teaching (Kumashiro, 2002). To create more gender-inclusive classrooms; this work involved a praxis cycle of reflection/action and engaging in a range of actions: critically listening to their student and their family, experiencing the discomfort of the unknown, interrogating colleagues’ opposition, shifting curriculum and pedagogies, and sharing their experience with their community-at-large.
Significance Researchers have shown that trans and gender-creative students report less victimization at school when they can identify one or more teachers who publicly support them, and that White students report feeling more supported than BIPOC students and English Learner-designated students (Kosciw, et al., 2018). This suggests that teachers who seek to be LGBTQ+ inclusive must rethink dominant belief systems about gender and sexuality along with other systems that contribute to privilege and oppression (Meyer, et al., 2015) and connect their shifting beliefs to practice (Staley & Leonardi, 2019). Similarly, Brochin (2019) cautions that unless LGBTQ+ content and perspectives are incorporated into teacher education, bilingual teachers may be encouraged “to become advocates for some marginalized groups while inadvertently silencing others” (p. 82).
Teachers’ identities, their linguistic backgrounds, their educational histories, and their ideologies all shape their teaching practices; without developing critical consciousness they run the risk of perpetuating oppressive conditions in their classrooms (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017). Sami and Molly show that the questioning process inherent in queering classrooms (Kumashiro, 2002; Staley & Leonardi, 2019) resonates with the process of developing critical consciousness; in both, teachers challenge norms and dominant narratives and attend to the role of power in their schools.

Author

• Caitie Dougherty, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author