“Makes Me Feel Poderosa”: Conversando in Spanish in the Bilingual Teacher Education Classroom de la Ciudad de los Vientos

• In Event: Unforgetting our Language Inheritance: Imagining Multilingual Teacher Education Futures in the Midwest

Abstract

This paper walks the reader on el camino of re-membering through conversaciones in Spanish centering the languages and cultures of Spanish heritage speakers in a bilingual urban teacher education classroom at a public university in Chicago. I discuss the curricular and pedagogical cambios in a foundations of bilingual education course that led to the creation of a space for heritage speakers, both instructor and students, to develop and practice the dispositions of critically conscious bilingual teachers by reflecting on personal and collective lived experiences (Valenzuela, 2016) through reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the heritage language.

I draw from Chicana feminist theorists (Anzaldúa, 1987; Moraga, 2000) to operationalize re-membering as the process of recovering and re/constructing memories and knowledges in the heritage language as potential sites of healing from the colonial and subtractive legacies of schooling by piecing together recuerdos and vivencias of languaging, schooling, and migrations. The voices of students highlight processes of self-transformation as the semester-long course en español unfolded.

The primary sources of data are one-on-one semi-structured interviews with a group of Latine pre-service bilingual teachers in an Urban Education program at a public university in Chicago. A secondary source of data is a series of written assignments the participants completed throughout the semester where they explored the relationship between language and culture in their academic trajectories. All study participants were undergraduates at the point of participation in the study. The group consisted of eight females and two males. The interviews were conducted in Spanish with flexibility to switch to English or translanguage in Spanglish; all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Once transcribed, the interviews were analyzed to identify themes and sub-themes following an inductive approach to narrative analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Pseudonyms were used for all participants.

The foundations of bilingual education en español course is the only class in the heritage language within the program that students can opt in to take, and for some, it is the first class where they engage with the Spanish language in an academic setting since elementary school, or at all. Upon completion of the course, participants were recruited to share their overall experiences in the course as well as their perspectives on the Spanish language. Students reported that the intimacy created in the classroom space around el español allowed them to examine their recuerdos and vivencias as part of the wider historical, political, and cultural experiences of Latinos in Chicago and the U.S., to feel empowered to use their heritage language in academic and public settings, and to outline the political dimensions of bilingual education.

I conclude by reflecting on next steps within the teacher education program de la Ciudad de los Vientos to provide opportunities for the critical development of Latinx pre-service bilingual teachers’ perspectives on bilingual education and Spanish language use in the current political moment, to further disrupt taken-for-granted ideologies in teacher education, and to engage in transformational processes to develop ideological clarity amongst students and faculty.

Author

• Jose Garcia, University of Illinois at Chicago