“Que Sueñes Con Los Angelitos”: Racialized Preservice Teachers Writing Their Lives

• In Event: Centering Racialized Teachers: A Proleptic Redesign of Teacher Learning Toward Leveraging Linguistic Diversity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the sociolinguistic autobiographies of thirteen pre-service teachers (PSTs) of color during a required course for their urban elementary education program. The undergraduate program is located in a public university in a large Midwestern city. The teacher preparation program has increased in numbers as well as diversity. Over half of the students in the program identify as Latinx, most of whom are bilingual Spanish speakers, although there are over ten different languages represented across any one year (cohort) of students.

The PSTs are participants of a longitudinal social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) focusing on the development of their teacher identities, as well as how they draw on their own linguistic and racialized experiences as pedagogical assets in service of their own students. In this writing assignment, students were tasked with writing about the role that language has played in both affording privileges at times, while other times causing feelings marginalization. Students analyzed their own family histories and individual experiences, examining their lives, but also offering particular perspectives and stories about themselves – beyond a simple positive/negative binary (Alcalá, Maravilla, Delgado & Morales, 2022; Flores, 2018).

Examples of translanguaging were found in eleven out of the thirteen sociolinguistic autobiographies, whereby the students used a language in addition to English, including one of the participants identifying as African American. Spanish was used for the titles of relatives (e.g., abuelo, tía), using culturally infused terms, such as “dichos” or “chisme” – including sayings, such as “que duermas con los angelitos” – or when using quoted speech, particularly from their parents, even in a regaño: “My parents would get upset when I didn’t know how to get my wording across by saying, “¿como sabes el inglés y no sabes traducirlo?” Another example of the use of translanguaging was to represent concepts emblematic of their two cultures as they identified them: “I loved playing futbol, and I love my double cheeseburgers as well.” Some students demonstrated positive language ideologies about their language practices: “One lady told me I spoke ‘Span-English’ because of my casual grammar. Then, I remember that people can still understand me very well, and there is no such thing as ‘Bad Spanish’ or ‘Bad English’.”

Thus, the role of translanguaging in their writing was significant, allowing students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires to demonstrate their understanding of their life experiences (Martínez, Duran, & Hikida, 2019). The expansive writing practiced allowed for an initial holding up of their lives for curricular examination while developing their understandings of course content. Implications for practice include promoting the deliberate role that teacher educators must play in helping students see and understand their own cultural knowledges and experiences as assets, and potential re-mediation of raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa & Flores, 2017), including the analysis or understanding of these past experiences as normalized (i.e., codeswitching) and strengths to draw from (Martínez, 2010).

Authors

• Karen Mariscal, Chicago Public Schools

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago