Community Teachers’ Practices for Rescaling Mixteco: Mobilizing Epistemic Ecologies in a Preschool Language Maintenance Program

• In Event: Discovering (to Construct) the Educational Possibilities of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Video-Based Linguistic Anthropological Approaches

Abstract

Culturally sustaining pedagogies counteract dominant norms in education through the centering of stigmatized communicative practices of children from minoritized communities (Paris & Alim, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014). Scalar models of language argue that participants' actions, through micro-processes of interaction, are determinative of distinctions in ranking for the linguistic varieties that cross-cut a space like a classroom (Blommaert et al., 2005; Kyratzis & de León, 2019; Mortimer, 2016). With the goal of contributing to understandings of how a minoritized language like Mixteco can be rescaled through micro processes of interaction, this paper looks at the linguistic and embodied practices carried out by bilingual Mixteco-Spanish Indigenous Mixtec community teachers (‘promotoras”) recruited through a community organization serving Mixtec families. University researchers provided early childhood training to the women and placed them in local Head Start preschools in Ventura County so they could bring their Mixteco language to the children there.

Interactions between promotoras and the children in their placements were video-recorded over three to four months. Close video analysis informed by constructs from conversation analysis were applied to understanding how the women made Mixteco language and culture relevant to the young children. Knowledge was treated as an emic category.

Despite children’s initial resistance to using Mixteco in the school setting, promotoras used a variety of resources—assessments, statements topicalizing peers’ states of knowing and speaking Mixteco through epistemic verbs (“saber”, “hablar”, “decir”, “aprender”)—to position Mixteco as a valued resource for classroom learning (M.H. Goodwin 2007; Melander 2012). Children responded by using Mixteco as a way to belong with and be on a strong, competent epistemic footing with peers in the classroom. They worked to publicly exhibit their belonging through exhibitions of knowing how to say, read, and write things in Mixteco. Through mobilizing epistemic ecologies, material arrangements of participants’ bodies, and the artifacts that they were using determinative “of what particular people could see and know” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012) in such a way as to highlight knowing and saying Mixteco words and reading and writing in Mixteco, the promotoras motivated the children to strive to exhibit the desired epistemic identities of Mixteco speakers, readers and writers and align with using Mixteco. Examples illustrate how this mobilization entailed human bodies interacting and building action and relationships in concert with one another in a material world (C. Goodwin 2018; Goodwin & Cekaite 2018), therefore contributing understanding of how education can be humanized and rendered relevant for children from non-dominant groups.

Author

• Amelia (Amy) Kyratzis, University of California - Santa Barbara