Finding Our Compass: Transnational Mobile Students Navigating Their Identity

• In Event: A Bilingual Renaissance: Remedying and Repairing Monolingualism Through Critical Multilingual Education Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

Amidst the backdrop and possibility of the Bilingual Renaissance, this study focuses on the joint responsibility and obligation of educational institutions, on both sides of the border (U.S./Mexico), to build the capacity, create educational programs, teacher preparation, and professional development opportunities that center the geographic, cultural and linguistic identities of transnational-mobile students. Throughout the United States and Mexico or wherever im/migrants settle or resettle, transnationally mobile students whether born in the U.S. or in Mexico, live with the imminent threat of being uprooted from their birthplace/residence (interim home)/ community /school and are expected to negotiate distinct educational systems and acquire an additional un/official language and societal codes of power. In route to acquiring a country’s language of power includes taking on a challenge to their identity (García-Mateus, Nuñez & Urrieta, in press) and for many students the process of this reality many times becomes a process of losing a sense of their cultural and linguistic pride and academic competency (Alfaro & Bartolome, 2017). When students lose a sense of who they are geographically, culturally and linguistically, they may also have difficulty co-living and communicating with their community, teachers, caregivers, and extended family members (Alfaro & Gándara, 2021).
Teacher educators on both sides of the border collaborated to create a theoretical framework grounded in sociology, anthropology, and psychology to inform both the theory and practice involved in the preparation of bilingual/binational teachers in a binational context.
We employed a phenomenological approach to the work and research. The focus of this phenomenological study was on understanding the phenomenon of teacher educators coming together from both sides of the border to strategically address the challenges in educating the students we share.
Binational teacher preparation calls for the integration of the sociocultural, sociopolitical, socioemotional, and sociolinguistic elements of becoming educated on either side of the U.S. -Mexico border. Findings about the creation of a collaborative curriculum for binational teacher preparation and its impact on transnational students’ identities will be shared and discussed.

Author

• Cristina Alfaro, San Diego State University