Humanizing Pedagogies and Scholarship Practices in the Cali-Baja Region: Rethinking Hispanic-Serving Institution Servingness to Cultivate Equity

• In Event: Innovative Educational Partnerships and Projects at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Centering Equity During Uncertain Times

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how one innovative inter-institutional program of bilingual teacher preparation was designed and implemented during the uncertain contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Duran & Nuñez, 2020). The study centers on how program leaders in the Cali-Baja borderlands collaborated across three community colleges and one university and operationalized ‘servingness’ to promote equity, bilingualism, biliteracy, binationalism and socioemotional well-being to prepare Latinx teachers in PK-12 schools (Garcia, 2019). In addition to academic outcomes such as enrollment, participation rates, and transfer rates, program leaders developed measurable non-academic outcomes as a way to cultivate and sustain equitable inter-institutional higher education systems in the 21st century. This study is guided by the following question: How do humanizing pedagogies and scholarship practices contribute to bilingual educators’ development of bilingualism, biliteracy and binationalism in the Cali-Baja borderlands?
Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on humanizing pedagogy (Doucet, 2017) as an ideological stance for developing IHE students’ bilingual teacher preparation knowledge, dispositions and skills in the Cali-Baja Borderlands (Hamman et al., 2006; Mordechay & Alfaro, 2019). Additionally, this paper also draws on Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework to shed light on how Latinx bilingual/binational community college and university students embrace their cultural and linguistic assets to become future bilingual educators. Specifically supported by this framework is the exploration of navigational capital to analyze the relationship between student-institutional interactions, racial-ethnic identity development, socioemotional stability and cultural belonging. Moreover, this paper also uses Garcia’s (2019) classifications of HSI organizational cultures to analyze how notions of ‘servingness’ have been implemented as well as to propose alternative ways to promote and sustain equitable IHE systems in the Cali-Baja borderlands.
Methods/Data
This study analyzes survey data, curricular content from professional development sessions, interviews and reflections from students and program leaders, and leadership community practices in two phases. The first phase is driven by a mixed-methods approach whose aim is to explore and understand the beliefs, motivations and experiences of future bilingual/binational educators in the context of COVID-19. The second phase of this study is a document analysis that seeks to better understand the structures of collaboration between HSIs in the Cali-Baja borderlands and how policy can shape institutions in order to promote equity, bilingualism, biliteracy and binationalism.
Findings & Scholarly Significance
Findings suggest that racial-ethnic and linguistic identity development, in concert with socioemotional stability, are essential for promoting sustainable and equitable higher education systems in the Cali-Baja borderlands. Humanizing pedagogical practices that prioritize non-academic outcomes such as students’ mental health, well-being, academic self-concept, engagement, and sense of belonging (Garcia, Núñez, & Sansone, 2019) are a prerequisite for centering equity. The study also reveals the importance of explicitly integrating humanizing pedagogical practices, learned during COVID-19, to strengthen an inter-institutional collaborative culture that reflects on the sociopolitical and sociocultural climate of xenophobia and immigration policies aimed at Latinx communities of the Cali-Baja borderlands. Future studies informed by humanizing pedagogy may provide additional innovative pathways toward strengthening IHE organizational cultures to cultivate equitable binational educational systems that center equity in bilingual teacher preparation.

Authors

• Mariano Lozano-Soto, San Diego State University

• Saúl Isaac Maldonado, San Diego State University

• Sera Jean Hernandez, San Diego State University

• Michael Wickert, Southwestern College