“We’re All in This Boat Together”: Latina/Chicana Embodied Pedagogies of Care

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present narratives that illustrate how Latina/Chicana teachers embody care through their pedagogical practices and interpersonal relationships with their Latinx students. We identify two foundational components of Latina/Chicana embodied pedagogies of care (EPC): (1) practicing a shared understanding of care and (2) developing a shared community of care. Through our Latina/Chicana EPC framework, educators can consider how to tailor their own pedagogies to best work with Latinx students and other culturally and linguistically diverse students. We utilized qualitative critical reflections and meta-study methods to analyze our separate research studies and present a new theoretical framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• Latino/a children and families
• teacher preparation
• curriculum
• qualitative research
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ We use the term “Latinx” as a gender-neutral term to include non-binary gender identities. The term also recognizes various racial/ethnic groups of Latin American origin. The student participants are of various gender identities, so we use Latinx. The teachers in our three separate studies identified as cis-gender women, which is why we use Latina/Chicana in the feminine spelling. We also interchange the use of Chicana, Mexican, or Mexicana to refer to the specific racial/ethnic identities of some participants. Also, while all the teachers in our study are of Latin American origin, not all are of Mexican descent, which is why we use Latina collectively.

² Each author engaged with different data analysis in her own respective study. Reyes used grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and portraiture analysis (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), Banda used a constant comparative method (Thomas, 2011), and Caldas used critical ethnography (Madison, 2011).