Reflections on Tere, testimonio, and teaching

2016

The goal of this self-study is to understand and make visible the process by which one first-year White, middle class, and female teacher in a largely Mexican/Mexican-American community creates curriculum that centers voices from marginalized backgrounds in efforts to engage students’ lived realities and challenge the traditional curriculum of a 9 grade English Language Arts classroom. This curriculum was developed while enrolled in a teacher education course titled, EDUC 593: Teaching Reading and Writing in the Content Area: Engaging Literacy through Latin American Testimonios of Struggle and Survival. This course serves to the inform choices made in curriculum as well as guide this self-study in order to shed light on how I came to understand literacy and education, especially for marginalized adolescents of Mexican/Mexican-American descent. This paper describes how Testimonio as pedagogy advises Culturally Relevant Teaching, and argues for an expanded definition of literacy. Find...

2007

Above all, thanks to God for the continued ability to dig deep, to go the distance, to give me strength of character to live for His glory, and for placing supportive people along my path in the Ph.D. journey. To family, friends, support group members, and mentors who selflessly gave in different ways, so that this work could be completed. I especially thank my family who took on extra childcare duties to give me more time for my comprehensive exams in Fall 2010, to edit version of my chapters, and to attend my seminar/support group. We all sacrificed time together, so I could work from one deadline to the next to make this dream a reality. And, last but not least, to the students who participated in my pilot studies, archival data and focus groups. May this work inspire change to better support each of you to reaching a high school diploma and beyond! ¡Mil Gracias a todos! Thanks to everyone! v DEDICATION I began the Ph.D. journey when my girls were one and three years old. I was determined to show them that girls can do anything! My partner Todd, who has been my best friend since I was 13 years old, committed to this dream with me. He quickly learned to care for the girls and to trust himself in sticky situations while I went to school at night and studied on weekends. I am forever grateful to him for his generosity and his ability to provide for our girls. They have genuine and connected relationships because of the many hours when they relied on each other. To my oldest daughter, Grace Isabel, who encourages me through her deep thinking and sincerity. Her poem "Working" written when she was six years old inspired me to finish this dissertation, and to find work that fills me up. To my youngest daughter, Madilynn Lee, who reminds me to be sensitive and thoughtful, and that life, work, and hence this dissertation, are incomplete without authenticity and creativity. To both our girls I cite the final words of a poem written by Lydia Cortés (2003) as she remembers her schooling and the words of her father, "…tú puedes hacer lo que quieres. Yo te apoyo en todo. Siempre" (p. 39) translated by her sister, Sonia Nieto, "You can do whatever you want. I will support you in everything. Always" (p. 38). May this work remind you that girls can do anything, that while Latinas may have more barriers to hurdle, I will be here to support you as you move forward in achieving your dreams-siempre. Always.

Journal of Culture and Values in Education, 2020

This study had three aims: to present a case study and explain the funds of identity of a Latina educator; to use this as an opportunity to connect heritage language to ideological clarity and humanizing pedagogies in educator preparation programs; and to illustrate how pedagogy and language education can include transformational and healing elements when educators are engaged in culturally and linguistically affirming professional development. By understanding ourselves as teachers in relation to the communities in which we teach, we are able to develop ideological clarity and reject deficit perspectives that serve to erase non-English languages spoken at home in order to effectively serve and advocate for our multilingual, emerging bilingual and heritage language students. This case study of one Latina’s journey to linguistic empowerment may serve as an example of how future teachers can transform their own experiences of language loss into empowerment and reclaim their own cultur...

Language Arts, 2011

English in Education, 2017

My work as a teacher and researcher in English classrooms is steeped in the cultural-historical past of my family. As I imagine a much-needed language of solidarity for Black and Latinx1 youth in English classrooms, I must return to the experiences my parents shared at Willow High School2 (WHS), located in an urban Southern California community I call Tajuata. My mother attended WHS until her senior year when she was pushed out,3 never encouraged to return. My father attended night school at WHS to learn English after arriving as an immigrant from Mexico at the age of 25. My becoming a teacher at WHS, where I taught for several years as well as conducted research for one academic year about the linguistic repertoires of Black and Latinx youth, was bittersweet for my parents. They have nothing positive to share about their experiences at WHS in the early 1960s, and having one of their own children become a teacher there was something they never imagined, given the meager opportunitie...

Drawn from a two-year critical ethnography, the author explores how Mexican-origin students in a U.S. southwest charter high school resisted Spanish heritage language instruction. Resistance was rooted in students' perception that their teacher unfairly characterized their linguistic and social identities. Students also constructed their non-native Spanish teacher to be a Spanishlanguage learner, disqualifying her to teach their heritage language, despite her proficiency. Misunderstandings arose from teacher's and students' limited imaginings of Spanish-language discourse communities. [Spanish heritage language, Mexican origin, charter high school, resistance, discourse analysis]

Language in Society, 2019

In racist societies, language ideologies legitimise the discrimination against racial- ised minorities. In the US, the emerging field of raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa 2015; Alim, Rickford, & Ball 2016) critically investigates the intersection of race and language and seeks to contribute to a more just society. Key sites for producing, reproducing, as well as contesting raciolinguistic ideologies are schools and other educational institutions, where young people are ‘socialised’, by means of a puni- tive grading system, into mainstream ideas about what counts as proper, good, or appropriate English. Proficiency in a particular socially idealised variety of white American English is selected as the benchmark for students’ academic success. Minoritised varieties, such as Englishes spoken by African Americans, Chicanx, or Latinx, are either devalued or at best seen as an additional cultural skill, yet one that is inappropriate for use in the school. Raciolinguistic research tries to unpack such racist ideologies and practices of institutions, teachers, and students; and it is also committed to transforming raciolinguistic ideologies and thereby contributing to greater social justice. Feeling it is a recent addition to the raciolinguistic work done in the US. The thir- teen chapters report and reflect on SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society), an ongoing justice-oriented and multi-sited academic outreach programme organised by a large university in California. SKILLS offers youth of colour, and in particular Latinx youth, opportunities to develop critical under- standings of dominant ideologies that link language and race. In American educa- tional practices, these youth are often severely disadvantaged, both because of their racialised bodies and their multilingual competencies, which include varieties of Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Rather than understanding students’ multilingual- ism as a problem, SKILLS educators chose to utilise recent developments in socio- linguistics—in particular turns to embodiment, affect, and translanguaging—to create safe learning spaces in which students can take agency over their multilingual repertoires and their cultural heritage.

English in Texas, 2013

In this article, we uphold diversity and 21st century skills as central to literacy pedagogy and use a cosmopolitan lens to present the integrated curriculum of a fourth grade bilingual teacher and the experiences of her students. We describe a unit built around language arts, science, and social studies with a focus on social justice and global connectedness for Latina/o students, many of whom were immigrants and transnationals themselves. We also analyze student responses to the unit in relation to cosmopolitanism and global citizenship. Students made connections to their own transnational experiences and were empowered to seek additional ways to engage in social justice.

Bilingualism and bilingual education: Conceptos fundamentales , 2021