Beyond DPS: One teacher’s struggle to advocate for Latinx bilingual students in rural Colorado

• In Event: La Lucha Sigue: Linguistic Justice and Educational Transformation for Bi/Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Objectives: Outside Denver Public Schools, bilingual education is not mandated for serving EL-identified (bilingual) students in Colorado, despite significant bilingual populations and longstanding Latinx communities throughout the state. Simultaneously, due to gentrification more and more bilingual and Latinx families are moving out of Denver into suburban and rural areas where, without the Consent Decree, there is little policy support to ensure success for bilingual children. This leaves advocacy and organizing for justice up to individual parents, teachers, and leaders. We will share the experiences of our third author, an ELD teacher in rural Colorado who is bilingual/biliterate, working with a largely bilingual population in an English-medium program. She developed leadership/advocacy skills and knowledge through the process of carrying out a classroom-based teacher inquiry project in her master’s degree program at our institution. Further, we will explore how Author3 and her colleagues - also recent graduates of our master’s program - are leveraging their new skills to advocate for improved programming and educational opportunities for their Latinx bilingual students.

Perspectives: For teachers who work with bilingual children, particularly teachers who are themselves bilingual, embracing leadership identities necessarily entails developing critical consciousness (P.Freire, 2000; J.Freire, 2019). Teachers are supported on this journey when they can build deep professional knowledge in bilingual education, a clear sense of their own cultural/linguistic identities, and a network of allies with shared commitments (Author1, 2018). Their leadership, then, necessitates advocacy on behalf of children and families. This framework for understanding bilingual teacher leadership supports our analysis of Author3’s experiences.

Methods and Data Sources: Author3’s own words, both in her inquiry project report and poster, and in a 90-minute semi-structured interview with Author2, serve as the primary data sources for this project, a merging of testimonio (Espinoza et al., 2022; Reyes & Rodriguez, 2012) and critical ethnography (May & Caldas, 2022). Authors 1 and 2 carried out a thematic analysis in close contact with Author3 (Saldaña, 2021), first open-coding and subsequently drawing on the above framework for bilingual teacher leadership (Author1, 2018).

Results: Findings illustrate the potential of teacher inquiry, particularly within the context of graduate professional education focused on educating bilingual students, to support and expand teachers’ leadership development. We will break down the ways Author3 strategically navigated the challenges of her rural school context – a low-resourced small school, dearth of policy direction, politically conservative community, cautious district leadership. Among other strategies, we note Author3’s intentional use of Spanish or English at different moments/stages while reporting and presenting her inquiry project, her leveraging allyships with white colleagues, and her reaching out for support/resources to current and former professors.

Significance. Our paper stands in contrast to others on the panel that examine the language/policy ecology within Denver’s public schools; we ask what happens outside the court-mandated zone. Our intention is to support building frameworks and structures for more widespread, cross-contextually relevant advocacy as more and more bilingual children and families across the US call rural and exurban spaces home.

Authors

• Deborah K. Palmer, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Brenda Ortiz Torres, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Silvia Ortiz, Weld County RE3J