Emancipatory Literacies Resisting Structured Literacy Mandates: Teacher Educators Advocating for New Mexico’s Multilingual Communities

• In Event: The Science of Reading Through a Multilingual Lens: Critical Perspectives from Teacher Education to Policy

Abstract

Education in New Mexico (NM) requires a genuine understanding of and value for the cultural and linguistic assets that have sustained the region’s human vibrancy for generations. Twenty-three sovereign Indigenous nations, whose citizens make up over 12.4% of the state’s population and speak at least eight languages (NMIAD, 2020), have existed in the region for millennia. Nearly half NM’s population identify as Hispanic or Latine, with many having roots in the region since the early 1600s, and at least a quarter speak Spanish (U.S. Census, 2020). These communities, alongside African American, Asian, and Middle Eastern families comprise a student body that speaks at least 95 languages (NMPED, 2025). Today’s linguistic and cultural vibrancy contends with legacies of colonization, forced assimilation, and language suppression, resulting in generational trauma, disproportionate levels of childhood poverty (U.S. Census, 2024), and marginalization of identities, languages, and culture within educational policy and practice. The milestone Yazzie/Martinez vs. State of NM (2024) case ruled that NM has failed to provide students who are Indigenous, multilingual, and/or have disabilities, as well as those whose families’ receive low incomes, high quality education services that prepare them for college and careers. As such, the state failed to uphold the NM Indian Education Act, Bilingual Multicultural Education Act, Hispanic Education Act, and Black Education Act (NM Center on Law & Poverty, 2019). Instead of investing in culturally sustaining practices, NM’s political and financial approach to rectifying years of educational disinvestment has centered on improving standardized test scores through misguided panaceas: mandating structured literacy through legislation, politicizing children's literacy development.

NM teacher education programs are in a tense situation: they must prepare teachers to effectively enact equitable practices via Yazzie/Martinez while being restrained by mandates requiring a type of literacy instruction that privileges whole-group, monolingual, Eurocentric, one-size approaches, over-emphasizing phonics instruction at the exclusion of home literacies and languages (Escamilla & Strong, 2024). Taking a critical multiliteracies stance that recognizes literacy development as complex, non-linear processes which are culturally embedded (Gee, 2015), this presentation examines how NM’s structured literacy mandates further marginalize multilingual learners in part by ensuring that new teachers are under-prepared to enact culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy pedagogies. We detail how NM teacher educators (NMTEs) individually and collectively engage in critical praxis to restructure how pre-service teachers learn to teach literacy. Forefronting culturally sustaining curricula and pedagogies (Paris, 2012) that honor children’s intersecting identities, repertoires, and historicities, NMTEs both model and foster advocacy. They advocate curricula and policies supporting language revitalization and multilingualism and authentic collaboration with families while ensuring candidates develop robust understandings of literacy, informed by myriad sciences, and an ideologically clear (Alfaro& Bartolomé, 2017) pedagogical toolkit that integrates access with equity. Candidates develop critical lenses through which to assess policy and curricula, design literacy lessons that validate and use students’ full linguistic repertoires, and become change agents. The dueling aims of NM educational policy agitate critical praxis in which we methodically challenge beliefs through self-reflective consciousness and ideology critique while strengthening emancipatory actions.

Authors

• Jen Stacy, University of New Mexico

• Mary F. Rice, University of New Mexico

• Sepideh Yasrebi, University of New Mexico

• Joshua T. Frank Cárdenas, University of New Mexico

• Violet Henderson, New Mexico State University

• Adrian Sandoval, University of North Dakota

• Daniel Olufemi, University of New Mexico

• Rosalia Pacheco, University of New Mexico

• Dawn Berry, New Mexico Highlands University