Juntxs With the Comunidad: A Collaboration Across Two Universities and One School District

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

Abstract

This paper documents the interdisciplinary collaboration between two universities and a school district’s DLBE department in Texas that took root due to the pandemic’s impact in the Latinx community. After engaging in virtual projects during the 20-21 school year: a bilingual homework hotline, mentoring with DLBE middle-school students, and university professors participating in bilingual parent meetings in the district, stakeholders were intent on expanding the collaboration as the impact of the pandemic subsided in the region.

Critical scholars in DLBE have proposed a fourth goal of critical consciousness (Palmer et al., 2019), and a key element is acompañar students, families, and communities from the margins (Author & Other, 2021) by walking with them amidst oppressive practices, policies, and discourses (Abril-González, 2020; Dyerness & Sepúlveda, 2020). While DLBE scholars frequently highlight the importance of critical consciousness work at the school district level, this has been noticeably absent from the literature. We argue that acompañamiento responds to the call for a “hard re-set” that centers the realities of racially and linguistically minoritized students (Ladson-Billings, 2021).

After a year of working across institutions and disciplines there was a strong desire to continue the collaboration, while there was also consensus that it should be documented through research. This critical ethnography is grounded in ethical commitments which require that stakeholders are consistently evaluating the purpose of the collaboration and engaging in critical dialogue around the processes that inform the research (Madison, 2020; Martínez et al., 2020).

Participant observation guides data collection processes, as researchers are also active participants. Field notes from weekly juntas are shared with all stakeholders in a digital folder that is also a space for sharing readings, stakeholder reflections, and proposals for conference presentations. Analytic memos serve as a way to make sense of the collaboration’s processes and specifically describe how stakeholders are striving to embody the elements of critical consciousness in DLBE spaces.

Findings reveal a commitment to accompañar the Latinx community, engage in critical dialogue, and leverage the knowledges of the collaboration. A homework hotline that partners pre-service bilingual teachers with students in the district’s bilingual program has provided bilingual tutoring, mentoring, and acompañamiento. Stakeholders have engaged in deep reflection as a way to look forward and expand the collaboration across institutions and disciplines. Tensions have also emerged due to diverging theoretical and practical commitments, as calls from university stakeholders for more explicit attention to racial justice have been met with resistance.

This collaboration reveals how Ladson-Billing’s (2021) call for a “hard re-set” has important implications for university/district partnerships. This study highlights the need to leverage the acompañamiento that emerged in order to “re-set” processes in education that prioritize racially and linguistically minoritized students and families. While the DLBE’s fourth goal around the development of critical consciousness has been documented at the classroom level, less is known about how it manifests in university/district partnerships. Finally, the interdisciplinary collaboration has methodological implications, as acompañamiento and critical listening across theoretical and practical divides is prioritized over the neoliberal logics of educational research.

Authors

• Dan Heiman, University of Texas at El Paso

• María Ortega