Survival Fugitive Practice in Research, Teaching, and Leadership in Dual Language Immersion in Minnesota

• In Event: Scholars of Color Imagining Educational Research as Reparation for U.S. Imperialism

Abstract

The pervasiveness of a technocratic and acritical approach to teacher preparation is part of the foundational political, ideological, and assimilationist forces that shaped the educational system in the United States. This is particularly evident in dual language immersion (DLI) settings, as it often affects (immigrant) communities of Color, resulting in raciolinguistic discrimination (Alim et al., 2016). For instance, DLI teacher training in Minnesota has consisted of a content-based and second-language approach with little or no critical sociocultural grounding. The dehistoricization of this field has erased the political nature and challenges that culturally and linguistically minoritized communities (e.g., Mexican American, Latinx, Chinese American, Puerto Rican) had faced in establishing bilingual schools in the United States, which includes its whitewashing (e.g., the dismantling of bilingual education and its renaming to Dual Language) and its ongoing gentrification in K-16 settings at different levels (teaching, research, and leadership). Minnesota provides a unique context due to 1) the way DLI schools operate, given that Minnesota only requires a general elementary education license to work in such programs, and 2) the technocratic legacy of teacher preparation and professional development in this state that uses the Canadian model for implementation. Socio-politically speaking, using the Canadian model disregards the stark differences between the status and prestige of French in an officially bilingual Canada and the violent colonial history between the United States and Mexico and Latin America in general at the intersections of race, class, immigration, and language (Cioe-Peña, 2022), further perpetuating linguistic imperialism.

This six-year (auto)ethnographic study follows four Latina bilingual teachers in different positions in the field (e.g., a teacher with a provisional license, a tenured experienced teacher, a supervisor at a school district level, a researcher in an R1 institution), describing the challenges they/we face in their/our different environments from their/our positions. Inspired by Nina Simone’s (1966) Four Women, these testimonios speak of the marginalization of Brown, Spanish-speaking voices, the covert racism and gaslighting at the workplace justified by the Minnesota nice trope, the work/ideas appropriation, and the underestimation of professional expertise due to the gentrification of the field at a professional level. Despite this erasure, these four (Latina) women show resilience as they become advocates in the different shapes it can take (Urrieta, 2009) in their own spaces as their/our paths intersect. These testimonios significantly advance the concept of violation (De Lissovoy, 2013) as an indictment of U.S. imperialism in the current neoliberal educational system. The testimonios show the resilience of teachers of Color from the “South” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) that inherited the legacy of grassroots resistance of the Latinx community to create cracks in the educational system from below as “hopes in lower case” (Walsh, 2023, p. 136) to exert change and as a reminder that empires fall from such cracks.

Author

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota