Toward a Preparación Palenquera: The Miseducation of Bi/Multilingual Teachers in the Midwest

• In Event: On Healing Linguistic Wounds: Bilingual Latinx Maestres Expanding Biliteracies Through Critical Pedagogies and Humanizing Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives
Traditional technocratic approaches to dual language teacher training that focus mainly on the integration of language learning and content engage in the subtractive preparation of Mexican American & Latinx novice and experienced teachers (Cervantes-Soon, 2014). These approaches hinder the development of critical awareness and might further create internalized racial and linguistic oppression on their students, hence silencing their bicultural voice (Darder, 2012) and stripping their different cosmologies, histories, and ontoepistemologies. Alternative educational frameworks that recenter community well-being and relink to often invisibilized and delegitimized knowledges are needed, away from paternalistic discourses of inclusivity (who is always "in"? who does the "inclusion"?)

Theoretical Framework
Following the tradition of fugitivity inherited from our Black and Indigenous foremothers in Latinoamérica (Harney & Moten, 2023; Cajavilca, 2014) , this paper examines the emergent preparación palenquera that a group of five Mexican American and Latinx bilingual teachers (including the authors) developed through (re)membering lessons learned through the knowledge imparted by in-the-flesh theorists in our lives and the offerings of maestrxs' through a series of capacitaciones apropos to the implementation of a multilingual summer school project, which aims to miseducate bilingual teachers working and create educational palenques. Palenques were villages founded by fugitive Black enslaved people in South America during colonial times. Like our ancestors, we see preparación palenquera as a fugitive space from the Eurocentric epistemic violence of teacher preparation programs and professional development in K-12 schools in order to (re)imagine other pedagogies that center community connection, medicine, activism, arts, our bodies and inherited struggles to serve our communities in the Midwest.

Methodology
This paper uses storytelling not just as a tool to unveil the cracks behind the official stories to bring to light the ones that offer a different perspective but as a cultural practice to pass down wisdom by pensar sembrando/sembrar pensando (think-sowing/sow-thinking—Walsh & Garcia Salazar, 2017). The process of this storytelling-weaving between the co-authors is supported by San Pedro & Kinloch's dialogic spiral (2017) as a method to co-reflect, co-analyze, and co-theorize our experiences through our vulnerabilities and feelings toward the aforementioned project.

Findings
The five partners-in-research contrasted their experiences as bi/multilingual teachers in K-16 settings and the preparación palenquera in preparation for the summer school, and agreed that the latter gave them space to engage in cimarroneo curricular (limitlessness curricular authorship) and a voice they usually do not have at school within a space of care where a mind-body-spirit connection was possible. The centrality of movement, drumming, and traditional medicine strengthened the connection between the ancestral knowledge the partners in research brought to the table and the contemporaneity of the issues discussed during this alternative professional development. This space provided a creative pedagogical outlet and an emergent familia for the partners-in-research.

Scholarly Significance
We extend the buenos vivires philosophies from the Global South (especially the AfroColombian vivir sabroso (see Mena Lozano & Arcadio Copete, 2019) and Quechua sumac kawsay (see Mendoza Zapata et al., 2020) to pedagogical approaches borne out of the search for rootedness and belongingness.

Authors

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota

• Mariane de Araujo Batista-McCulloch, University of Minnesota