Accompaniment for the climb: Becoming reparational language educators of Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language

Abstract

‘Heritage’ language classes (e.g., native speaker or native language literacy classes) are often taught by already licensed world language teachers. Only a handful of U.S. teacher preparation programs offer explicit and extensive preparation for teaching ‘heritage’ languages (National Heritage Language Research Center, 2017). ‘Heritage’ language pedagogies (Fairclough & Beaudrie, 2014) and teacher preparation (Caballero, 2014; Potowski & Carreira, 2004) are underdeveloped and undertheorized. This dissertation considers what is possible when a teacher learns to teach Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language by attending to raciolinguistic ideologies and raced-language schooling policies/practices, generational knowledge of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, and lineages of collective struggle. This is informative for both the preparation/support of ‘heritage’-language specific teachers and for conceptualizing of critical and humanizing pedagogies that center the desires and possibilities of ‘heritage’ language learners. This dissertation emerges from the participatory design of one multiyear ‘heritage’ language program at a Midwestern city public high school that took shape around reparational aims for educational justice. It draws on five years of participatory research designs and the use of paired collective memory work. Participatory research connected multilingual and multiply racialized youth of Américas descent (self-named as Jóvenes con Derechos), their black multilingual non-Latina Spanish as a heritage language teacher (Toni), and a white multilingual non-Latina teacher educator (Jenna) as co-researchers and co-designers. Over five years, Jóvenes con Derechos youth, Toni, and Jenna engaged in multiple overlapping and interacting participatory action research and design projects that shaped the development of a reparational stance towards ‘heritage’ language education, curriculum, and pedagogical approaches. Youth-led participatory action research projects connected youth with existing movements for social change led by members of their own communities and in solidarity with other communities of color and Indigenous communities in their state and beyond. Using participatory design research components of historicity, instructional thinging, curricular infrastructuring, and role re-mediations, this study offers methodological and conceptual theorizing of participatory and humanizing research and pedagogies. I argue for the need of “methodological arts of the contact zone” and suggest as examples the framework of “interlapping participatory research projects” and collective memory work. This work also outlines an argument for conceptualizing ‘heritage’ language education as reparational in its desires and designs. The methodological framework of interlapping participatory research, accompanied with paired collective memory work, is then used to make visible the processes of becoming reparational language educators through a memory work montage of instructional thinging and necessary role re-mediations over time. Final implications consider what is required of teacher preparation institutions to engage in the formation of critical pedagogues who take a reparational stance to language education that understands multilingual youth of color as co-designers of their educational experience in schools.