Supporting Elementary Students' Cultural Identity Development: Resistant Teacher Discourses Within Culturally Sustaining Familial Relationships

• In Event: Academia Cuauhtli: Crafting an Architecture of Authentic Cariño

Abstract

1. Objectives

The goal of our research was to describe how Cuauhtli teacher family epistemological discourses challenged and resisted dominant assimilationist ideologies.

2. Theoretical framework
Bilingual teachers at Academia Cuauhtli challenged dominant deficit discourses of family participation and epistemologies which framed parents as ignorant of US schooling practices and in need of education/assimilation into Whitestream, middle-class neoliberal cultures on how to support/parent their children. Teachers framed their interpretation of the sociopolitical relationships of the Mexican transnational families they work with as a generation of Mexican immigrants who entered the United States in the 1990’s as economic refugees and became the majority of low-income families served by the Austin Independent School District. Teachers drew from culturally sustaining discursive frameworks (Paris & Alim, 2014) to describe how they aspired to partner with families to support the schooling of the bicultural students they served.
3. Methods
This paper applies narrative modes of inquiry to center the experiences of elementary teachers at Cuauhtli. It uses pláticas as a culturally relevant, Chicana qualitative interviewing strategy that uses social relationships to delve critically into dialogue and move between personal perspectives and critical analysis.
4. Data sources
It draws from six ethnographic interviews with teachers, nine pláticas, and twelve video conferences in which teachers are in the process of implementing family knowledge into Cuauhtli curriculum. Such interviews integrated year-long reflections with focused questions about generative themes. We also received member feedback on their perspectives on major themes identified.
5. Results
In this study, we document the voices of a group of Cuauhtli bilingual teachers as they frame/negotiate resistant ideologies which attempt to center family knowledge in their schooling practices (Olivos, Jimenez-Castellanos, & Monroy Ochoa, 2011). Teachers engaged in critique as they negotiated the spaces between and among familial and intellectual forms of cariño. Initial results describe how building off familial knowledge was seen as crucial in supporting student cultural identity development in a culturally hostile schooling environment. Teachers’ analyses of the source and impact of this hostility differed to include curriculum, school environment and/or pedagogical approaches, leading to different priorities for how they should draw from and/or implement family knowledge within their pedagogical approaches.
6. Scholarly significance
For Cuauhtli teachers, familial collaborations were seen as central in their role in developing the students’ cultural identity. They also emphasized how this area of social knowledge construction was important to contest both for them as teachers and as collaborators of family resistance to US cultural norms. Given these results, this study points to the connections and contradictions between teacher interpretations and implementations of culturally sustaining pedagogies and resistant ideologies. In particular, we highlight the role of familial relationships and epistemologies in resistant practices.

Authors

• Christopher Milk Bonilla, Texas State University - San Marcos

• Roberto Young, University of Texas - Austin