Action to Teach and to Know in Nepantla: Developing "Pedagogical Noticing" Through Conscientious Bi/multilingual Teaching

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

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to explore agency within Neplanta (Anzaldúa, 2002) spaces of three Latinx teachers who developed what Anzaldúa (2007) calls a “mestiz@ consciousness” as bi//multilingual teachers of dual-language (Spanish-English) immersion programs in a Midwestern city.

Theoretical Framework
I approach these teachers’ professional identity and agency using Anzaldua’s (1987, 2002) seven stage invitation, a “spiritual hunger” (Anzaldúa, 2002) to encounter our shadows as we travel in search of self-discovery, change, and new understandings. In this individual process, one is put in nepantla, or “in-between” (Anzaldúa, 1987) where we are exposed to other perspectives and able to see knowledge from inner feelings and “see through” them with “holistic awareness” (p. 544). This research was also informed by Emirbayer and Mische ‘s (1998) vision of agency that considers three dimensional factors related to a ‘temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and ‘acted out’ in the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects with the contingencies of the moment)’ (ibid., p.963).

Methods and Data Sources
This qualitative study draws on the linguistic and cultural life histories of three K-5 Latinx teachers of dual-language programs in the Midwest. I conducted three life history interviews (Goodson, 2013) over four months and analyzed teachers’ experiences, beginning with their memories of growing up mono/bi or multilingual to their pedagogical trajectories as key for informing their professional identities.

Results
First, these teachers’ agency and professional identities helped them create more equalizing spaces that counteracted the dynamics within the linguistic, social, and political communities in tension. Second, teachers’ multilayered and strategic reclaiming and drawing upon their linguistic, cultural, social and ideological resources allowed them to develop a “Pedagogical noticing” that is to articulate pedagogical moves based on students and teachers’ linguistic and cultural identities, which they purposefully and meticulously leverage within the social context of their classroom and their schools. I argue that these teachers’ agency, newly situated understandings and their reclaiming of their linguistic and cultural identities within “neplanta” spaces became transformative moments as they brought both sociopolitical consciousness and healing that gave further meaning to their professional identities and their own identity-affirming practices at school and within the classroom.

Scholarly significance
The significance of these teachers’ “Pedagogical Noticing” and approaches is that they represent successful models of more robust enactments and embodiments of a fuller, holistic bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural professional identity, which demonstrates ideological clarity (Bartolomé, 2008). Further, these teachers’ practices (re)shape emergent bilinguals’ (Garcia, 2009) learning contexts based on new interactions and relationships that help counteract meta-discourses that might reinforce unequal power dynamics in U.S. dual language teaching contexts (Palmer, 2007).

Author

• Patricia E. Venegas-Weber, Seattle University