Pillars of Hope in Two-Way Immersion Spaces: "Spanish, Love, Content, Not in That Order"

• In Event: Teacher Agency and “Pedagogies of Hope” for Bilingual Learners (in a Brave New World)

Abstract

Objectives
The proposed Frierean fourth pillar of TWBE around the development of student’s critical consciousness (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017) presents the field with hopeful possibilities at a crucial time when neoliberal processes are targeting these respective programs. Due to these processes, there is an urgency to move beyond TWBE’s traditional pillars of academic rigor in two languages, biliteracy, and multicultural competence to include this focus on critical consciousness. This paper seeks to document how a fifth-grade Latinx teacher in a rapidly gentrifying TWBE community enacted this proposed fourth pillar.

theoretical framework
The recent explosion of TWBE programs (Palmer et al., In Press; Wilson, 2011), mainly due to the surging interest of English-dominant families, poses a potential threat to the original race radical view of bilingual education as a space of empowerment for Latinx communities (Flores, 2016). Lacking a critical perspective, there is great potential for these programs to become “gentrified” (Valdez et al., 2016) and driven by neoliberal goals that center a global human capital framework (Valdez et al., 2014). Due to this neoliberal “path” (Peck et al., 2009) targeting TWBE programs, critical scholars are calling for a counter path that integrates critical pedagogy as a transformative vehicle in the development of students’ critical consciousness (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017).

Methods
This nine-month critical ethnography documented a TWBE program in a rapidly gentrifying urban context in the southwest US in 2015-2016. Specifically, this study focused on how these gentrification processes impacted the program, how major stakeholders made sense of these transformations, and their responses to these processes. In addition, and the focus of this specific paper, the study documented a critical fifth-grade teacher’s pedagogy, curriculum, and engagement with her students and their families.

Data sources
Field notes from classroom interactions and house meetings with families, interviews with students and families, and classroom artifacts comprised main data sources for the paper. These data sources were analyzed by researcher and teacher, as the teacher served as “anthropological confidant” due to our collaborative relationship inside and outside of her classroom and her insight around these data sources (Foley & Valenzuela, 2005). This provided a powerful and more nuanced understanding of local events and relationships in her classroom and in the school community.

Results
Findings revealed the teacher’s enactment of TWBE’s proposed fourth pillar around the development of students’ critical consciousness, specifically driven by her personal TWBE pillars of “Spanish, love, content, not in that order.” Each of these pillars will be discussed in connection to a proposed language-as-empowerment framework, a critical pedagogical extension of Ruíz’s (1984) language-as-resource framework that centers the interests of transnational bilinguals and their families amid the current neoliberal assault on TWI programs.

Significance
The implications of the teacher’s language-as-empowerment framework, specifically around her personal pillars of “Spanish, love, content, not in that order,” revealed the hopeful possibilities of a critically-driven TWBE classroom that moves beyond the oftentimes apolitical traditional pillars of TWBE. This extension of Ruíz’s (1984) framework has implications in the areas of policy, practice, and teacher preparation.

Authors

• Dan Heiman, University of North Texas

• Michelle Yanes, Austin Independent School District