Decolonial Combing as Partnership and Praxis

• In Event: Toward Remedy and Repair in Multilingual Education: Critical Participatory Inquiries With Emergent Bilinguals and Families

Abstract

Objectives
Despite expansive research on family engagement, interpretation persists as presenteeism in schools (Evans & Radina, 2014). Family engagement encompasses all the varied ways families engage with their children (Authors, 2020; Baker et al., 2016), and is inclusive of relatives, friends and kinship nested within care and love (Brooks et al., 2020). To critically examine family engagement from the perspective of in-service teachers, we partnered with five Midwestern school districts and a community agency to develop a critical research-practice partnership (RPP) for teacher education. Our research question follows:

How do in-service teachers of emergent bilingual students negotiate, conceptualize and enact family engagement?

Guiding Framework 
We employed a framework of “critical pedagogical disruption” (Author, 2020, p. 85), which uses disruption to transform ideologies and enhance teachers' engagement with families through family perspective-taking (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Zipin, 2009). Palmer et al. (2019) builds upon perspective-taking, emphasizing critical listening, historicizing, embracing discomfort, and interrogating power (p. 121). We further argue that interrogating power is the final step in developing systemic advocacy, which is shaped by the other actions (Figure 3 in PDF: Critical Pedagogical Disruption: Stages of Critical Consciousness in Teacher Education).

Methodology
We employed a multisite, illustrative case study with Centro Educativo to examine the home activities of racialized emergent bilingual families (n=24) and how in-service teachers (n=21) interpreted the family activities. Our partnership with Centro Educativo enabled our interactions to delve deeper given their trustworthy relationship with families. We examined teachers’ course-activities and coded for critical listening, historicizing, embracing discomfort, and interrogating power.

Results
Findings among in-service teachers demonstrated increased capacity for critical listening, but less in historicizing, embracing discomfort, and interrogating power.

Critical listening. Teachers developed an understanding of the varied practices of emergent bilingual families and appreciated their creativity, use of multiple languages and resources. Teachers engaged in the family visits with curiosity, given the additive framing.

Historicizing. This was the least saturated area, as most teachers focused on families’ current practices without inquiring about family’s histories of transnationalism and multilingualism. This lack of historicizing led some teacher’s toward technical solutions, remediating their English proficiency.

Engaging Discomfort. Monolingual English teachers expressed more anxiety about the language barriers that would foreclose on successful interview event. Racialized multilingual teachers, while proficient in the language of families they interviewed, excavated their own discomfort given their experiences with subtractive schooling (e.g. prohibition of native language use).

Interrogating power. Most racialized multilingual teachers were able to name, describe and enact power interrogation informed by critical listening, historicizing, and embracing discomfort. Specifically, they engaged in decolonial combing, able to strain out the pursuits of schools that restricted their families’ multiple identities.

Significance
Decolonial combing as praxis is fostered by partnering with community agencies whose pursuits are situated in empowerment. Such partnerships enable engagement with racialized multilingual families so they are centered; and systems are more holistically interrogated. Further decolonial combing offers tools to in-service teachers to engage the first three pillars of critical consciousness, avoiding technical and subtractive solutions (Palmer et al., 2019).

Authors

• Rong Zhang, Appalachian State University

• Annie Garcia, Purdue University

• Alejandro Baquero-Sierra, Purdue University

• Trish Morita-Mullaney, Purdue University