Teaching and Knowing in Nepantla: “I wanted them to realize that, that is being bilingual.”

ABSTRACT

Bilingual teachers’ professional identity inquiry may open up possibilities for agency and equality in U.S. dual language contexts. Deploying Borderland, Agency, and Position theories, this article narrates the life histories of three nepantlera Chicanx/Latinx dual language bilingual teachers—Jessica, Roberto, and Marta—who work in different English-Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) schools in a Midwestern city. Jessica self-identified as Chicana and the other two participants as Latinos. The purpose of the study was to examine the complexity of these teachers’ professional identity development and their possibilities for agency within nepantla—their negotiating of their linguistic and cultural identities as English- or Spanish-only teachers in a dual language program with a strict language separation model. Data included three life history interviews with each participant over four months. Findings suggest possibilities for teachers’ assertion of their silenced bilingual voices, for reclaiming their linguistic and cultural identities, and for further developing their “bilingual pedagogical noticing,” as well as conscious leveraging of their aesthetic and deeply personal understanding of themselves—of nepantla—to assert more holistic bilingual and bicultural identities in DLI programs. Through sociopolitical consciousness and the leveraging of educators’ and students’ identities, the context for teaching and learning can be (re)imagined to allow for (re)presenting teachers’ fuller, holistic professional identities and for opening up potential spaces for agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• bilingual pedagogical noticing
• bilingual teachers
• linguistic and cultural identities
• professional identity

Notes

¹ The term emergent bilingual highlights an additive view on bilingualism and also represents the dynamic nature of language development of students and educators. It includes the important role of these students’ first language and contests deficit monolingual lenses that only value their acquisition of English (García, 2009)

² One of my participants self-identified as Chicana, while the other two self-identified as Latinx; I therefore use both terms throughout this article.

³ The term late exit transitional bilingual program refers to a type of bilingual program model for emergent bilingual students that starts with instruction in Spanish but with an end goal of transitioning all instruction to English-only instruction, in this case in fifth grade.