Unforgetting Histories & Nurturing Futures: What Mamá Gallina Teaches Literacy Educators about Healing Biliteracies

• In Event: Emancipatory Pro-Black and Pro-Latinx Reading Research and Teaching

Abstract

Objectives
Because becoming and remaining biliterate in the U.S. is a continual challenge for minoritized bilinguals (Nuñez, 2022), we describe the connections between the popular Spanish nursery song “Los pollitos dicen” (The Little Chicks Say) and Aesop’s fable’s “The Fox and Hen” with the literacy teaching of bilingual Latinx students. In this metaphor, the bilingual teachers represent the Mamá Gallina (Mother Hen) and their students represent the pollitos (little chicks) in their care. Then, we detail the teaching context from three elementary classrooms with bilingual Latinx students that spurred the metaphor for Mamá Gallina taking care of her pollitos in the classroom. These classrooms suggest how teachers could act as the “Fox” and perpetuate white English hegemony and the “Mother Hen” who mobilized their biliteracies to metaphorically feed and clothe their “baby chicks” with cariño (often translated as “care”).
Perspectives
Grounded in raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa & Flores, 2017) and Latina pedagogies of care (Reyes et al., 2023), we interrogate historical and ongoing patterns of linguistic harm in schools while foregrounding teacher practices that imagine more just and hopeful futures for bilingual learners. We conceptualize biliteracies both as measurable competencies (Escamilla et al., 2014) and as lived, relational, and cultural practices (Gort, 2019; Authors, 2023) shaped by everyday negotiations with power, identity, and belonging (Chang-Bacon & Colomer, 2022).
Methods
This collective case study (Stake, 2005) was conducted in an urban school district in the southwestern U.S., which implemented a one-way Dual language (DL) program model. This district draws from several neighboring communities serving 40,000 students.
Data Sources
Author 1 interviewed three experienced bilingual reading teachers using stratified random sampling about factors which influenced their students’ biliteracies. These bilingual teachers were selected to be interviewed based on their students’ bilingual reading motivation scores. This paper focuses on the interviews from the bilingual reading teachers with the pseudonyms of Mr. Zúñiga, Mrs. Ortíz, and Mr. Salazar.
Through iterative coding using the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2014), Author 1 found that the teachers’ tools were not only resistance strategies used in direct opposition to English hegemony; instead, they were healing tools used to develop and sustain students’ biliteracies to the fullest (Kaveh & Estrella-Bridges, 2024).
Results
Despite this complicated role of oppressed-oppressor, the bilingual teachers in this study candidly referred to several strategies in their classroom context. These healing principles are instruments of rehumanization in “the pursuit of full humanity” (Freire, 1970, p. 41) for their bilingual students. As can be seen in Table 1, these practices constitute a form of educational unforgetting, a way to remember and activate a more liberatory future.

Scholarly Significance
This study contributes to education research by re-centering bilingual Latinx children and their teachers within histories of exclusion and ongoing linguistic marginalization. It offers a vision for futuring education through bilingual pedagogies that resist hegemonic norms and nourish students’ full humanity. In doing so, it aligns with AERA’s call to imagine restorative and transformative possibilities rooted in historical wisdom and community care.

Authors

• Kimberly Muñoz, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo

• Alexandra Babino, Texas Woman's University