Troubling Traditional Researcher/Teacher/Participant Positionings in a Bilingual/Bicultural Fourth Graders' Cultural Revitalization Program

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Ethnographic Approaches at the Intersections of Curriculum, Ideology, Language, and Race(ism) in Bilingual Spaces

Abstract

In this paper, we read and write critical ethnography through decolonial frameworks as we consider Academia Cuauhtli, a unique cultural and linguistic revitalization program for Latinx, Spanish/English, bilingual/bicultural elementary school students. Specifically, we engage critical ethnography with decolonial theory and frameworks as we address the subjective possibilities, constraints and refusals among Academia Cuauhtli community members involved in the teaching, learning and research with the out of school program. To do this we situate ourselves -- the students, researchers, community and partners -- in relation to the material, ideological and discursive regimes of power through which, and against, the Academia Cuauhtli (Author 2, 2015; Valenzuela, 2017) project makes sense as an educational space poised to “[h]onor our community’s cultural heritage, foster a social justice consciousness, and reclaim our collective identities in pursuit of educational freedom” (Academia Cuauhtli Vision Statement). We attend to the local and temporal exigencies of social justice work as we interrogate the productive possibilities and limitations of working and doing research within colonizing grammars of imperialist nation-state geographies, histories and subjectivities. We present findings from our collective and individual work with the academia, as well as ethnographic research conducted by authors 1 and 3. Data include transcripts from a lesson taught by author 2, in which the Academia Cuauhtli students and families take up and resist state sanctioned subjectivities as presented in standards based Social Studies curriculum. Findings demonstrate the potential of out of school, community based programs like Academia Cuauhtli to engage different and disruptive subjectivities within and against contemporary discursive, ideological and material forces operating in schools.

Authors

• Brenda Rubio, University of North Texas

• Randy C. Bell, University of North Texas