Becoming an "Avocado." Embodied Rescriptings in Bilingual Teacher Education Settings: A Critical Performance Ethnography

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Ethnographic Approaches at the Intersections of Curriculum, Ideology, Language, and Race(ism) in Bilingual Spaces (Table 15)

Abstract

The present critical ethnography provides a nuanced picture of the emergent advocacy identity of a group of bilingual pre-service teachers in Texas as they rehearsed their new voices through the pedagogical implementation of Forum Theater (Boal, 2000) to explore socio-cultural and raciolinguistic (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016) issues utilizing translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) practices. This kind of research methodology allowed all the community to engage and reflect on the disruption of the hegemony of English in the Ivory Tower by privileging the use of stigmatized intimate language practices for academic and professional purposes. However, since Theater of the Oppressed was the cornerstone of this research, the centrality of the body in the process of becoming pushed me to look for not only for alternative modes of inquiry that reflected and evoked movement and change but also other ways of dissemination. Performance ethnography provides an additional and complementary lens that privileges the embodied knowledge of the community members, the ethnographers, and the audience in our own culture/identity-making. This productive vulnerability of self-reflexivity allows the researcher to be in horizontal dialogue with the community members, thus putting ourselves in line with the messiness, the same way they put themselves on the line by sharing their lives. Therefore, I created a one-person multimedia ethnodrama (Saldaña, 2011) of my ethnographic work as “co-performance witnesses” (Madison, 2007) influenced by the work of Soyini Madison (2018, 2011, 2007) and Omi Osum Joni L. Jones (2015, 2016, 2002).
Critical performance ethnography goes beyond theorizing culture in order to understand the reality of the people immerse in such culture (Jones, 2006) as it engages subjects in the actual “doing of culture and democracy” (p.344) and how such performance shape experience, meaning, and culture but most importantly, its processes since it is continuously in the making. This methodology provides a different lens that is centered in the body as a source of knowledge addressing other bodies. Madison (2007) extends the centrality of the body in the performance ethnography to the researcher, calling them “co-performative witness” in that they live dialogically with the participants within their spaces and their struggles at a certain point of their socio-cultural context. Placing the researcher’s body on the line with the messiness aligns with notions of relational accountability (Wilson, 2008) to the community as partners in research (Jones, 2002). Performance ethnography is then a political act since it allows all “co-performative witnesses” to participate as in history-making. The dialogical nature of this methodology and the inclusion of a public performance consider the following elements: witnessing, community accountability, self-reflexivity, audience engagement, and open advocacy (Jones, 2015).

Author

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota