Hablando Pa’tras: Developing Critical Conscious Bilingual Teacher Education Programs in Mexican-American/Latinophobic Times

This introduction situates the focus of this special issue within the walls of a bilingual education program where the authors examine their pedagogical and curricular practices, trajectories, and commitments toward its transformation to foster critical consciousness among Mexican-American/Latinx bilingual teachers through convergent research projects. Using diverse qualitative methodologies (case studies, life history, testimonio, critical place inquiry) within the same setting, the articles in this special issue provide examples of how each of the authors responds to the call to desmadrar the field in times of blatant discrimination against the Mexican-American/Latinx communities.

The dismantling and renaming of bilingual education (Flores & Murillo, 2002), the English-only movement (Macedo, 2000), anti-immigrant initiatives (Moya et al., 2016), the inadequate funding and services for emergent bilinguals, and the gentrification of dual language programs (Valdez et al., 2016) speak to a set of ideologies that see Mexican-American/Latinx students as a commodity at best, and as a liability and danger at its worst. Therefore, bilingual teacher preparation programs have the responsibility to prepare pre and in-service bilingual teachers to respond to the needs of their students by not only acknowledging their cultures and languages as additive resources but also by providing access to opportunities historically denied and working towards reversing the inequalities perpetuated by the dominant culture and ideology. This call is urgent due to the open anti-Mexican/Latinx/immigrant sentiment and white violence exacerbated during the last four years by the exiting 45th government (Anguiano, 2019), which may not be readily quenched by the incoming one. Efforts towards growing critically conscious teachers (Alfaro & Bartolome, 2017; Palmer et al., 2019; Valenzuela, 2016) are crucial to foster political and ideological clarity (Bartolome & Balderrama, 2001; Sánchez & Ek, 2008) among future teachers working with Mexican-American and Latinx emergent bilingual students.

As bilingual teacher educators and researchers interested in preparing bilingual teachers, we are collaborators in a collective engagement who shared similar linguistic repertoires and are direct participants in the culture of bilingual teacher preparation programs. Therefore, we have an ethical responsibility to seek out spaces to engage in research and teach “against the grain” (Cochran-Smith, 1991); a commitment to the annals of academia and our bilingual teacher community to desmadrar (Medina, 2020) our field by centering critical consciousness in the professional development of pre and in-service teachers. As such, we present our work as scholars/activists and open our classrooms’ door and our experiences to share our engagement in pedagogies of resistance and empowerment using our own cultural and linguistic wealth.

This special issue articulates a necessary shift towards a critical orientation in bilingual education programs, proposes promising pedagogical and curricular practices when working with Mexican-American/Latinx bilingual pre-service teachers, and advances an emergent discussion among bilingual teacher educators/researchers and the urgency to center critical consciousness before and after teaching induction. The authors respond to this challenge by advancing new research and pedagogical approaches with a particular emphasis on race, cultural wealth, immigration status, and the rights to use minoritized language practices, all of which are often marginalized in academic spaces.

This special issue showcases five original studies that attempt to recreate the different aspects of a bilingual education program and our participation in it as instructors, mentees, mentors, and direct protagonists of the challenges and tensions we encountered as we worked with novice and seasoned bilingual teachers and engaged in the figured world of bilingual teacher educators (Holland et al., 2001). Espinoza, Nuñez & Degollado illustrate the use of local funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) as a border thinking pedagogy (Cervantes-Soon & Carrillo, 2016) to encourage bilingual pre-service teachers to develop community-based lessons that challenge normalized negative discourses regarding Latinx neighborhoods. In this paper, bilingual pre-service teachers are assigned to explore the communities around their field-based placements to bridge home and classroom knowledge and develop their own sense of belonging to be transmitted and enforced in their teaching. In the second article, “Spanish Language Development and Support in a Bilingual Teacher Preparation Program,” Caldas shows concrete efforts to support bilingual pre-service teachers to pass a state-mandated language licensure test and critique its monoglossic nature utilizing multilingual tools to overcome linguistic erasure and shame. Heiman, Bybee, Rodríguez & Urrieta’s article highlights the centrality of neighborhood caminatas as an embodied pedagogy of deep learning in discomfort. These caminatas, guided by the authors, allow the confrontation of bilingual pre-service teachers against ongoing gentrification and their own misconceptions and become an opportunity to use their senses to experience the concretization of local knowledge as the beating heart of a Mexican-American community in Texas.

Two manuscripts included in this issue also examine the bilingual education site beyond the induction of future bilingual teachers into the field but also explore its role in the continuous professional development of experienced teachers to become school leaders back at their school districts or in preparing teacher educators and researchers in other higher education institutions in the country. Rubio, Palmer & Martínez explore a first-person account of Martínez’s trajectory as an immigrant teacher and his journey to conscientization (Freire, 2000) through his participation in a bilingual master’s program that fostered leadership and advocacy through humanizing pedagogies (Palmer, 2018). Finally, using testimonio and reflexión, Caldas & Heiman shared their professional trajectories as bilingual instructors working and doing research among bilingual pre-service teachers and the tensions they encountered due to contradictory institutional language ideologies and practices, differing stances toward activism, and their growth as teacher educators and researchers. The authors used the lessons learned from the “messiness” they encountered as scholars-in-training to guide their steps as they try to creatively “fit in” their research interests and political commitments in their new academic environments.

Since hablando pa’tras means “talking back,” the authors of this special issue designed their manuscripts in such a way that reflected the languages we, our participants, our collaborators, and our audiences live wholly and fully. Therefore, each contribution has adopted a variety of language policies to display their work; from in-text full Spanish translations and footnotes to no translations to seamless sentences that reflect our multilingualism and how we write with an accent as a way to finally free and legitimate our wild tongues (Anzaldua, 1987) in writing in academic spaces.

About the Guest Editor

Blanca Caldas is a transnational indigenous/Latina scholar and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on bilingual teacher education, minoritized language practices, and critical pedagogy. She presents her work in local, national, and international conferences (including ethnographic performances), and publishes in both English and Spanish.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a toda mi familia académica (authors and reviewers alike) for all the patience to read todos mis emails to submit, make changes, y cada uno de mis recordatorios in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and the BLM uprising that affected our lives in different ways and has moved our connections to a virtual sphere. Gracias por las porras and for setting limits for your time when asking needed extensions, reminding me I also needed them. A special thanks to Robert Brown Jr., who copyedited this special issue with very limited time. I also would like to extend my appreciation to the editors of the Journal of Language, Identity and Education and all the production team behind for all the support.