Joy: Teacher’s Culturally Responsive Practice and Learning in Indigenous-Based Pedagogies

• In Event: (Re)Centering Our Collective Knowledge in a Tlahtocan Community Dialogue Circle: Indigenous Pedagogies From Central Texas

Abstract

Purpose
This paper presents an empirical study on how bilingual-bicultural elementary teachers in central Texas create culturally relevant pedagogies by engaging in students' race, language, and culture rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. Children go to school with the hope of learning, playing, creating new friends and connections, and developing various cultural and language skills that will shape them over the course of their school years and beyond. This paper considers teachers' efforts to provide a quality educational foundation (Fránquiz et al. 2021) for Latinx students by examining their understanding and commitments to serving linguistically and culturally diverse populations with Indigenous roots (Fránquiz et al, 2011; Irizarry & Donaldson, 2012). It asks: How do Bilingual Bicultural teachers draw from joy and Indigenous epistemologies in their teaching practices to create culturally responsive lessons?

Perspectives
Building on the frameworks of Joy, (Muhammad, 2023) and culturally relevant pedagogies (Villegas, A. M., & Davis, D. E., 2008) this case study explores the ways teachers draw on Indigenous joy to design lessons for their students that are reflective of their culture, family and community knowledges.

Modes of inquiry
In this qualitative intrinsic case study, participants included two elementary bilingual teachers in a large Central Texas School District. This place was selected given my personal relations to the community, educators, and students as well as its commitment to promoting and sustaining students’ cultural background, language, and racialized identities, through Indigenous pedagogies in and outside the classroom programs. To answer my research questions, I organized pláticas, observations, and the sharing and examination of artifacts (students work and teacher curriculum planning), videos, and field notes.

Evidence
Evidence discussed in my analysis draws on artifacts that consist of lessons created and facilitated that intend to foster culturally relevant learning based in Indigenous knowledges. I incorporate video clips and artifacts to present and share the findings.


Warrants for Arguments
Teachers' culturally relevant lessons demonstrate ways they draw from joy and Indigenous epistemologies, to provide Latinx students in central Texas with the opportunity to learn and experience Indigenous, family, and community-based “knowing” (Urrieta, 2013), even when these have been historically erased and excluded from schooling. These curricular choices reflect teachings of mother earth, the pedagogical tool of a Tlahtocan Community Dialogue Circle, and an emphasis on understanding and building on the gifts, identities and relationships of students.

Scholarly Significance
To understand who we are and where we are going we must recognize, recover and reclaim our roots. We must comprehend where we come from and learn from our ancestors’ millennial teachings. While we must call out the ways colonialism has erased or excluded our Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing, as educators we must commit to the survivance of mother earth, each other, and our Indigenous communities, through a lens of Joy, focussing on our Indigenous knowledges that have been developed over and passed on for generations.

Author

• Ana Isabel Carrasco, The University of Texas at Austin