La Importancia de Platicar en Comunidad: Engaging Participants in Collective Reflection and the Co-Construction of Knowledge

• In Event: The Value of Our Words: Sustaining Radical Women of Color Epistemologies in Qualitative Educational Research

Abstract

As a Latina doctoral candidate, I am intimately familiar with and concerned with the educational experiences of Latinx students, who are often taught via deficit language pedagogies that seek to “repair” their Spanish and English language practices. This paper describes the use of a plática in a study that weaves together Chicana Feminist Theory and LatCrit to allow Latina/o/x participants to critically and collectively reflect on their language education experiences. Here I focus on Latina/o/x educators who are Spanish heritage speakers (Valdés, 2001) and whose students are also Spanish heritage speakers, to encourage interdisciplinary conversations between education and Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) research.

Although there has been an increase in the use of pláticas as a valid methodological approach in the field of education, there are few examples of the steps undertaken and virtually no examples of this method in SHL studies. This study positions a member-checking focus group as a plática to disrupt the eurocentric practice of the researcher as the sole interpreter and creator of knowledge. I share the process of a plática as a guide for others enacting critical research methodologies. A reflection of the power of plática in research that values experiential knowledge and seeks to learn from and co-construct knowledge with BIPOC educators will also be provided.

This study is informed by my experiential knowledge as an SHL educator and Spanish heritage speaker. I first documented the testimonios (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012) of eleven SHL high school teachers who are heritage speakers of Spanish. Participants shared their language education experiences across the educational pipeline: as English learner students and as pre-service teachers preparing to become high school Spanish teachers. Across the testimonios, participants experienced the inversion of their bilingualism (Rosa, 2019). Because of these marginalizing experiences, teachers now push back against linguistic racism in their own SHL classrooms via their teaching practices. To engage in member-checking and co-construct knowledge with participants, I invited the teachers to participate in a plática.

During the plática, I shared the preliminary findings with the participants by explaining, modeling, and engaging participants in the coding process. We opened the doors to vulnerability as we began to reflect on each testimonio excerpt, which often consisted of traumatic memories. We identified the intersections and differences in our individual and collective experiences. There were moments of sadness, anger, frustration, encouragement, and most importantly, of establishing comunidad. During this plática, participants collectively realized the raciolinguistic (Flores & Rosa, 2015) discrimination and marginalization they had experienced throughout their schooling in the US, particularly in their teacher preparation program. We brainstormed ways to actively push back against the deficit framings of Latina/o/x bilingual students in pedagogy and policy. Participants shared that this collective sharing of testimonios felt therapeutic, a place where their language experiences and resilience mattered. Thus, the plática became a way to both member-check and humanize the participants, providing them with a seat at the data coding and analysis table, centering their knowledge at the core of the research.

Author

• Nancy Dominguez-Fret, University of Illinois at Chicago