Resetting Family Engagement: Embracing "Co-Maestros" in Virtual Dual-Language Bilingual Classrooms During a Pandemic

• In Event: Resetting From the Margins: Humanizing Educational Experiences With Racially and Linguistically Minoritized Students and Communities

Abstract

This paper highlights critically conscious family engagement practices by two DLBE kindergarten teachers in an urban Title I school in Arizona. We focus on how the teachers incorporated family relationships to support bi/multilingual children’s learning and foster critical consciousness as the schools transitioned into synchronous online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We draw from two theoretical frameworks. Firstly, we use critical consciousness to examine practices that promote sociopolitical consciousness in racially and linguistically minoritized children while supporting their bilingualism, biliteracy, and academic achievement (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Freire, J., 2020; Henderson & Palmer, 2020). Secondly, we draw on Ishimaru’s (2019) framework for equitable family-school collaborations to study the role of racially and linguistically minoritized families as the schools transitioned into home contexts.

This paper is part of a larger longitudinal study that uses critical ethnographic methods (Carspecken & Carspecken, 1996; Madison, 2020) to understand the experiences of stakeholders in DLBE, including children, parents/caregivers, and teachers. Through critical ethnography, we interrogate inequities facing marginalized communities (Palmer & Caldas, 2015) and their triumphs to foster social change and overcome those inequities (López-Gopar et al., 2013).

The participating DLBE program enrolls 93% Latinx, 4% Black, 3% White, and 1% Indigenous students. The paper focuses on the practices of two bilingual Latinx teachers who co-teach the kindergarten grade in virtual and hybrid formats (i.e., in-person and virtual). Gloria, the designated English teacher and veteran educator from Texas, was paired with Alejandra, the designated Spanish teacher who moved from Mexico three years prior to this study. The data were collected through virtual observations of classroom instruction and teacher’s planning meetings. Additionally, we conducted two semi-structured interviews with the teachers in the summer, 2020 and spring 2021, to gain insight into their instructional decisions, language ideologies, and perspectives on family engagement.

Our findings show that despite the challenges of teaching kindergarten online, Gloria and Alejandra used it as an opportunity to create and expand space for racially minoritized children and families to share their stories, traditions, and lived experiences. The teachers’ provided critically conscious instruction that prioritized the well-being of families and focused on children’s identity formation (Alfaro, 2019). Additionally, the teachers reimagined family engagement to create equitable partnerships with families, addressing and positioning parents/caregivers as “co-teachers” (or ‘co-maestros’) and transforming their role into fellow educational leaders. Thus, rather than trying to recreate school in the pre-pandemic form, these two kindergarten teachers engaged in a “hard re-set” (Ladson-Billings, 2021) and transformed their practices to respond to the ongoing needs of their classroom communities.

Although critical consciousness has been increasingly studied in DLBE, most research has been done in upper elementary, middle, and high school settings (Diemer et al., 2016). As such, this work contributes to our understanding of critical consciousness in early childhood education that remains under-examined (Chaparro, 2019, 2020). Additionally, the study’s focus on equitable family-community collaborations in a school serving predominantly racially minoritized communities during the pandemic is timely and significant to our efforts for cultivating equitable education systems for the 21st century.

Authors

• Yalda M. Kaveh, Arizona State University

• Cory Alan Buckband, Arizona State University