Latina (Im)migrant Mothers’ Trust in Dual Language Schools: Antroilustración as Arts-Based Methodology

• In Event: Between the How and the What: Negotiating the Messy Middle of Arts-Based Methodologies for Social Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This testimonio practitioner research builds on the relational trust between a dual language kindergarten teacher and the immigrant families whose children she teaches. It explores Latina immigrant mothers’ testimonios of their experiences building relational trust with their children’s dual language schools. The author illuminates the history of dual language education and Latine family engagement in the U.S. to highlight the trails of destruction left by structural racism, deficit thinking, and neoliberalism, which sustain the systems of inequity these mothers must navigate.

Framework
Guided by an assets-based approach, care-based research questions, and a theoretical framework built on critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), relational trust theory (Bryk & Schneider, 2002), and Chicana feminism (Anzaldúa, 1987), this study uses art and story to honor mothers as complex individuals, value their powerful m(other)work and empower them as women. The conceptual framework foregrounds three main components of these mothers' intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 1989): their motherhood, their latinidad and their (im)migrant experience, using the concept of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to analyze the mothers’ testimonios. Theories on mothering position the undervalued status of mothering as the product of the same capitalist and colonialist system that continues to marginalize racial, linguistic, and cultural groups throughout the world, while theories on latinidad situate the erasure of Indigenous and Black people from mainstream understandings of Latine culture in colonial history through the use of a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017).

Methods
This practitioner study uses individual interviews, descriptive inquiry processes, photovoice, collaborative creative direction, and collective letter writing to elicit mothers’ testimonios, positioning them as counterstories to deficit perspectives of Latina immigrant mothers so pervasive in the ideologies and policies of US education (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

Data
The author uses an original technique called antroilustración to represent the mothers’ stories, wherein she and the participants create and collaboratively analyze collage illustrations from the ideas, words, and images generated through interviews and photovoice (Chaparro, 2020).

Results
Findings encourage practitioners to learn more deeply about the expertises of the people they serve, and to take time to develop relationships of trust through reciprocal actions of genuine care. Moreover, they must consider mothers’ knowledge and needs in the design of instruction and school communication and outreach. The author calls for the reimagining of schools as community spaces that are safe for children and that engage culturally responsive communication with families. This approach is built upon the foundation of listening to mothers’ wisdom about their childrens’ nature and needs without judgment. When this happens, practitioners can better understand and meet student needs in collaboration with mothers and families intentionally positioned as valued knowledge partners.

Significance
This practitioner research seeks to understand the unique complexities of how each mother makes sense of her role in her children’s educación and in the home-school relationship. This methodology attempts something less traditional, but more attuned, ethical, and accurate. Incorporating collaborative creative elements into the methods broadens the ways the researcher and participants relate to and learn from one another.

Author

• Cybil Rose Yakira, University of Pennsylvania