El Instituto: Cultivating Bilingual Teachers' Linguistic Capital Through a Raciolinguistic Approach

• In Event: Trenzas para un Nuevo Sol: Critical Bilingual Professional Development for Solidarity, Transformation, and Equity

Abstract

Objective:
Traditional teacher learning is mostly conceptualized through prescribed curriculum in school-based and district-sponsored professional development opportunities, that are often race-evasive (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2014) and framed through dominant, neoliberal, and deficit ideologies that foster linguistic hegemony and privilege English language learning. For Spanish bilingual teachers, critical professional development becomes a much needed opportunity that can provide a space to engage in critical and dialogical learning when completely facilitated in Spanish. While substantive research has examined race, language, and culture (Urciuoli, 1996; Zentella, 1997; Spears, 1999, Makoni et al, 2003), it has only been recently that a collective theorization of race and ethnicity with language has began to emerge from recent studies (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016). It is due to many organizing efforts through critical professional development for bilingual teachers that race and language are finally recognized for their important intersectionality.

Theoretical Frameworks:
Guided by the concepts of Critical Professional Development (CPD) and Raciolinguistics, this paper seeks to meet the critical needs of K-12 spanish bilingual educators teaching in multilingual contexts. To theorize the relationship between race, language, and culture together (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016), this paper incorporates a raciolinguistic approach. This allows for the examination of the role of language in maintaining and challenging structural, institutional, and individual forms of racism. This paper also uses CPD to frame bilingual educators as intellectually and politically engaged actors who actively participate in shaping society (Kohli, Picower, Martinez & Ortiz, 2015) through their participation in critical professional development. Bridging these lenses, this paper explores the impact of a CPD, El Instituto, that aims to cultivate equitable dual language programs by centering bilingual teachers’ linguistic capital (Yosso, 2005) and preparing them to challenge deficit and racist ideologies.

Methods & Data Sources:
This paper explores a case study of El lnstituto, a week-long critical professional development for bilingual teachers in Southern California, conducted entirely in Spanish. Guided by the strands of community building and leadership development, El Instituto aims to center teachers’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), by centering their linguistic capital and deepening their Spanish-language knowledge, while also developing their critical consciousness and supporting teachers in their understandings of racialized languages, pedagogies, ideologies, and actions in the K-12 classroom. Building from six years of qualitative data with over 150 bilingual teachers, this paper uses observations, participant feedback, artifacts, surveys, and interviews to unpack how bilingual teachers use their critical consciousness to engage in collective action that challenge dominant, neolibiral ideologies in dual language education.

Findings & Significance:
The findings of this case study suggest that incorporating a raciolinguistic approach in a Spanish facilitated CPD, not only disrupted the normalization of English-only professional development, but it also exposed bilingual teachers to the intersections of language and race as they relate to their praxis in dual language classrooms. El Instituto, exposed bilingual teachers to critical theory and research by centering their linguistic repertoires, experiences, and knowledge to engage in collective action towards transformed ideologies and critical pedagogy.

Author

• Nallely Arteaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills