Abstract
This article centers the memories and identities of Black and Brown teachers as they (re)engage with their school experiences. King and Swartz define (re)membering as the process of reconnecting knowledge of the past. We feature two stories—The first is from Roberta and Rachel who demonstrate how Black women reclaim voice, agency, and their own narratives. The second is Sandra and Sara’s as they (re)member their journeys as Latina, bilingual teachers in schools that often diminished and even erased their cultural heritages. We resist the current systematic arrangements that render certain children, schooling contexts, and Black and Brown teachers invisible and left scrambling for their past.
Preserving cultural memories, within the backdrop of White, dominant culture, has long been a struggle for recognition and validity for communities of Color. King and Swartz (2016) define (re)membering as the process of reconnecting silenced and distorted knowledge. These memories are fragile and intimate, offering windows into our cultural, historical, and racial identities—(re)membering is the mechanism by which marginalized communities find voice and agency in spaces not built for their participation. Reframing curriculum as an activist act, one that centers culturally relevant knowledge and practices for Black and Brown children, has continually been forwarded and extended through calls for culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs; Paris & Alim, 2014). CSP “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 1). But what about teachers who are still navigating the denial and erasure of their cultural and political identities? How do Black and Brown teachers re/uncover their own memories as a tool for constructing spaces of preservation, cultivation, and resistance for children of Color in urban classrooms?
This article centers the memories and identities of Black and Brown teachers as they (re)engage with their own experiences. Teaching is carework (Dillard, 2006), embodied through relational networks and energized by shared experiences. We argue that for Black and Brown teachers committed to culturally sustaining practices (Paris & Alim, 2014), remembering our cultural and historical roots is about reclaiming our stories—the stories of our oppression and marginalization, the stories of our collective experiences and resistance, and the stories that were repressed and hidden from view. We feature two stories—the first, of Roberta and Rachel who demonstrate how Black women reclaim voice, agency, and their own narratives through healing conversations. Kinship and care were mobilized by memories of childhood, schooling, and adult experiences that resonated into curriculum and pedagogy for Black students. The second story is that of Sandra and Sara, who (re)member their journeys as Latina, bilingual speakers in schools that often diminished and even erased their cultural heritages. Given the current, anti-immigrant rhetoric and the threats placed on Latinx communities in the United States, they describe how teachers’ memory work intertwines with children’s fears, questions, and inquiries around their citizenship status and identities as Latinx, immigrant students. Through critical memory work, we resist disparities of care, and the current systematic social and professional arrangements that render certain children, schooling contexts, and Black and Brown teachers invisible and left scrambling for their past.
Challenges for Black and Brown Teachers
Research has demonstrated the need for more Black and Brown teachers (Achinstein et al., 2010; Cheruvu et al., 2015; Haddix, 2010, 2017; Villegas & Lucas, 2004). In the United States, while students of Color continue to increase with an expected projection of more than 50% by 2020, teachers of Color only make up a marginal 14% of the educators in the profession (Feistritzer, 2011). In teacher education, an “All Lives Matter” approach dismisses the needs of teachers who aspire to teach in predominately non-White or all Black contexts (Mayorga & Picower, 2018). This approach constricts and consumes discourses, policies, and practices. Conversely, justice-focused literacies aiming to sustain, heal, and enrich the spirit of Black and Brown teachers as well as students and families are relegated to the margins as the fragility and resistance of White, middle-class monolingual teachers is centered (Cheruvu et al., 2015; Jackson & Kohli, 2016; Paris & Alim, 2014).
At the same time, when Black and Brown teachers enter the field, they are more likely to work in underresourced, high-poverty, high-minority schools (Sutcher et al., 2016). Many Black educators also encounter increased oversight, marginalization (Jackson & Kohli, 2016), and emotional tensions (Mawhinney, 2008). Children of Color are also less likely to have highly qualified classroom teachers who look like them (Darling-Hammond & Berry, 2006). Locating qualified teachers for multilingual students is particularly challenging. López et al. (2013) found that only 14 states offered a special certificate in English as a Second Language (ESL) and/or Bilingual Education. Only 15 states required all teachers to be exposed to some instruction on supporting English language learners (ELLs), and 12 states had certification processes that did not even mention any skills needed for teaching ELLs. Even when there is instruction working with ELLs in teacher preparation programs, it is from a monolingual lens that, many times, only focuses on how to get students to acquire English, even at the cost of losing their first language.
Why This Matters
When Black and Brown teachers enter the classroom, they leave the profession at a rate 24% higher than their White counterparts each year (Ingersoll & May, 2011). Given the benefits of having Black and Brown teachers, it is important to deepen understandings about their experiences. However, limited research exists on Black and Brown teachers’ experiences (Amos, 2010; Montecinos, 2004). This is largely because statistically, structurally, and ideologically, teaching is a predominately White vocational space (Jackson & Kohli, 2016; Kohli & Pizarro, 2018). Moreover, much of the research has focused on how to support White, female, middle-class, and English monolingual teachers to work with diverse learners and develop CSPs (Godley et al., 2006; Gomez, 1993, 1996; Haddix, 2008; Zumwalt & Craig, 2005). In what follows, we center our stories, our memories, and our experiences navigating what remains a White profession. How do we re-engage with our memories to foster safe spaces for children of Color? We share how four Black and Brown teachers worked together as part of a program called Professional Dyads and Culturally Relevant Teaching (PDCRT), specifically designed to support Black and Brown teachers in implementing CSPs in the classroom.
Critical Memory as Praxis: Two Black Teachers Enacting Culturally Sustaining Care
I have to be honest with you. When I think back, I learned a lot in the program, but, I didn’t. I don’t think they cared about us, or maybe they just didn’t know. When I think about it, we didn’t learn anything about teaching Black kids in my district. (Rachel)
When we (Roberta and Rachel) began working together as a teacher/teacher-educator dyad, Rachel was a second-grade teacher in her third year at an all-Black urban intensive (Milner, 2012) elementary school in the southeastern United States. Roberta was a limited term faculty member at an urban intensive university. We were both students at a predominately White university when we first met; Roberta was a graduate student, teaching courses in children’s literature and writing instruction. Rachel was an undergraduate in her final year of her preservice program; she was the first Black student Roberta encountered in the undergraduate program, and Roberta was the only Black instructor Rachel had during her 4 years at the university. Being honest began on the first day of class, at first glance. It was embedded in the subtle smile we exchanged, and the looks we passed throughout the semester—a look that said, “I see you,” and “I understand.” As Black students in a predominately White space, we each walked on a racial tightrope. As the only Black student in her cohort, Rachel chose silence as a form of self-preservation despite having questions and concerns about White-centric teacher socialization pedagogies (Matias et al., 2016). Roberta engaged in self-censorship while learning how to disrupt the status quo. Working together in the culturally relevant professional dyad program after transitioning into our professional roles was, like many Black reunions, a joyful reclamation. As McKittrick (2006) asserted, “Black matters are spatial matters” (p. xii). The space we recreated was physical, intellectual, and relational. Reuniting allowed us to resist ideological, spiritual, and psychosocial spatial arrangements that result in omissions, isolation, self-censoring, second-guessing, and cultural knowledge gaps. Perhaps most importantly, reuniting allowed us to remember.
Throughout, we emphasize critical memory work (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002; Gay, 2000; King & Swartz, 2016). We assert that culturally sustaining practices that emphasize contexts of care are not only for Black students but also for their teachers. Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) specifically characterizes Black feminist caring as “an embrace of the maternal, political clarity, and an ethic of risk” (p. 71). Knight (2007) notes that contexts of care are intertwined with racial and ethnic dimensions. The complexities associated with caring for teachers and students within racial/cultural contexts remain a critical but underexplored aspect of preservice teacher education and in-service teacher retention (Williams, 2019). We use personal narrative and collaborative inquiry as methodological approaches to argue that urban schools serving Black students, teachers, and teacher-educators must deeply interrogate how enactments of care or lack thereof, and constituent memories, influence instructional practices and educational praxis. The threads of stories included on these pages, and those within us, are rooted in beliefs that Black educators (formal, informal, and intergenerational) are mentors and cultural translators (Dixson & Dingus, 2008; Irvine, 2002) who must be heard and consistently be cared for and about.
Rachel’s comment about “not learn[ing] anything about teaching Black kids in her district” occurred during a planning and research meeting between us. During our 2-year collaboration, we centered culturally sustaining Black arts–based literacy pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2014) in Rachel’s second- and third-grade classrooms. Although not the focus of this article, we found infusing culturally sustaining visual art practices provided healing contexts and expanded student voice, both promising but underexplored motivational literacy contexts for elementary students in urban schools (Gardner, 2017). These explorations also enriched our relationship with each other, our students, our past, and our future. The discussion thread at the beginning demonstrates how we recalled previous educational contexts, teachers, and practices. Tracing our own schooling experiences, however, was not a deliberate or intentional part of our planning process. At first, it appeared in the data simply as a rhetorical move. However, we soon recognized it as an inherent, unconscious but essential part of our framework for enacting culturally sustaining practices. For Rachel, an “all lives matter” mind-set in her teacher education program limited her ability to be an effective teacher and demonstrated a lack of care about the needs of Black students. As she shares later, Rachel rectified these omissions by drawing from the intellectual well of her mother and a host of othermothers (including other teachers, and Roberta) to inform and expand the Black communal teaching practices she needed to help students thrive emotionally and academically.
Our relationship foregrounds critical memory work grounded in culturally relevant care. These are unrecognized, culturally sustaining practices for Black educators, and powerful methods for resisting curricular violence occurring through oversights, omissions, lack of care, social–cultural/racial dysconsciousness (King & Swartz, 2016). Our voice-centered work draws upon spiritual, intellectual, and intergenerational knowledge derived from our past threaded with and into our present philosophies and practices (King & Swartz, 2016). Data sources included life notes (Dillard, 2006) and literary references that shaped our cultural memories, understandings, and practices across time and place. We used traces of these memories, aroused and recovered over the course of 2 years, to nurture each other and renew our spirit and intellect for teaching, researching, recovery, and rediscovery of ourselves.
Several years after our reunion, remembering remains a part of our culturally sustaining educational praxis, and we have learned to foreground memory with an intentionality and purposefulness. As Alexander (2005) argued, “remembering is different from looking back.” She asserted, “We can look back side-ways and not bring things into full view” (p. 275). Restoring this knowledge helped us navigate “indigenous institutional racisms” (Alexander, 2005, p. 9) that manifest in a multitude of ways. Reminiscing helped sustain and liberate Rachel’s students and ourselves as we enacted future-oriented remembering (Eppert, 2003, p. 4). It is the kind of memory work that resonates with possibilities.
We remember through stories and recognize that we are always looking for a safe space to tell them. As we do, we strive to expand Black teacher discourses and practices to inform educator pipelines in the interest of Black children. Using the “theories of our flesh,” we emphasize remembering as an act of decolonization (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2002) and a form of resistance. We asked how collective remembering nurtured our will and spirit and how the demands of our past could inform our present teaching practices. We sought a usable past, to bridge the contradictions of our racialized-gendered and classed schooling experiences, asserting our relationships with each other and to our past was/is our survivance (Burkhard & Kinloch, 2019). Even as we share individual memories, we recognize our connectivity and collectiveness; and, moreover, that we are the evidence of all our stories. As Dillard (2012) asserts, African women are not stories of a singular self but are stories of we: that we-ness is often manifest in rituals deeply embedded in African women’s wisdom and knowledge, our strands of wisdom. (p. 54)
We highlight the socio-intellectual stories of Black women’s interdependence, and the importance of tracing and documenting these memories through and with other Black women as educational praxis. Although Black educators’ perspectives are voiced, they remain unheard, particularly, Black teachers in working-class contexts who navigate the contradictions of caring for Black students while little attention to caring for or about their needs is given.
Remembering What We Have Been Taught to Forget 1
Rachel knew all of the best spots to eat, and all of the tricks about how to get a table. We often met for brunch, indulging in rich southern foods we never regretted eating. Between tasting each other’s meals, we made curricular plans, and we remembered: I am a theorist, and so is my Mother. (R. N. Brown, 2013, p. 11)
Rachel remembers. 2
Starting out, I didn’t know how to get my babies to listen to me. I was doing it right, like we were taught down state, but it wasn’t working. You know what though? I slowly became my mother. Most of what I learned about teaching in my school district, I learned from her. If I hadn’t listened to her, I would’ve been able to keep my job. She told me not to be afraid to speak up, and to let them know who you are. You know, it’s an inside joke to use that teacher voice, but I know what my mother meant. I have children who will not hear you if you don’t speak the language of their mothers and aunties. They might hear you, but they will not listen to you. See what I’m saying? It’s like, in our classes down state. Hearing how you talked to me or responded to students . . . like that. It came out. Sometimes, the things that you brought up in the books that we read, that kind of thing reminded me of her too. My mother never published academically, but she was a former teacher, and an administrator. She earned a doctorate and was a single mother of four children. She was right. I just needed to let them know who I was, not just as an authority figure, but someone, they could relate to and hear—like an auntie, mother, or family figure.
Roberta remembers
Knowing that Rachel heard inflections of her mother’s voice (Dr. Cheryl Gilmore) in my teaching was affirming. During that time, I pushed equity-oriented topics and race-centered book discussions, towards the end of the semester, so white students had a chance to get to know me before putting up a wall of silence. Still, they sometimes used gestures like passing race-centered books without parting the pages or situating their gaze on the floor, to ignore topics they didn’t want to address. Although I knew we should be there, Rachel’s presence within the university classroom gave me courage and served as a reminder that we belonged. My mother’s Black female sensibilities of simply saying what needed to be said, were embedded in the discursive moves I made with students, no matter how I attempted to censor myself. The echo of our mothers’ voices reminded us of Ruth Nicole Brown’s assertion that our mothers are theorists, just as we are. They remind us to sustain undiluted versions of ourselves, and they aroused our consciousness to rectify the ways we’ve been miseducated in white spaces. Remembering, and recognizing them/ourselves as theorist, ultimately helped us to counter the conspiracy of second-guessing ourselves; or worse, losing our cultural knowledge and ultimately ourselves.
Although different in nature, access to relational support networks is a challenge for Black kindergarten to fifth grade (K-5) teachers and Black faculty within universities (Generett & Cozart, 2010). The lack of access can occur even when a critical mass of students/teachers of Color exists. For example, although a critical mass of students of Color existed at the university where Roberta was teaching, the number of Black and Brown professors did not reflect the student population. The diversity of the teacher candidates was a source of institutional pride. It was also promising for the teaching field and personally for students. For example, many teacher candidates were first-generation college students, meaning they had the potential to shift economic and educational access for their entire family. Several students were also bilingual, and, in some cases, trilingual, which strengthened support for dual and multilingual language learners in schools. However, relational structures of support (e.g., bilingual teachers of Color) were absent. This support was important because several Latinx students were also Dreamers or from mixed-status families, meaning some family members were undocumented. These teacher candidates were caught in a political web of anti-immigration sentiments and policies designed to delegitimize their humanity, limiting their capacity to be effective assets in their schools and communities. Behind closed doors, students often sought emotional reassurance and support as they encountered inequitable racialized structures and practices within and outside of the program, adding to the challenges of an already rigorous teacher certification program. Lack of structural support created instances in which the few faculty of Color attempted to provide students of Color with contexts of care and kinship, despite the additional emotional labor this created, particularly for faculty members already on the fringes of academia.
Similar to students in the teacher education program, as an academically successful Black teacher who chose to teach within a high-stakes context, Rachel was living the realities of inadequate support and dehumanizing policies. Racialized structural forces added to the stress of teaching 25 students while the threat of school closure and state takeover loomed. Several of Rachel’s students were “below grade level” and labeled with behavior issues while navigating emotionally traumatic realities in their families and communities. Some students relied on the classroom to feel more empowered. Determining how to funnel their desires into productive struggle was a daily challenge. Rachel had legitimate questions about how to balance sensitivity, firmness, and high expectations for her students and, at times, felt alone and overwhelmed as colleagues fought their own battles against what appeared to be a losing war. As our students and, in Rachel’s case, also parents leaned on us for various reasons, we held each other up within an emotionally supportive personal and professional network. We sent affirming text messages, engaged in weekly or biweekly collaborative teaching, and had Sunday brunches where we remembered. Although we each had at least one confidant within our work environments, the existence of care and kinship outside the sphere of our school spaces was critical for unencumbered reflection. It was a space where we could be vulnerable without unfair assessment or comparisons.
We Remember: Gestures That Provoke Remembering, Forgetting, and Love
Ms. Thomas shared a story about her brother going to jail, and her voice cracked, when she talked about protecting us from police brutality. Mr. Duval wrote a full orchestral score called “Africa” which we performed for our families. Ms. Rowe, drove us home after every drill team practice. Ms. Gilmore lifeguards at the pool every summer.
As we reminisced about the Black teachers we have had, we noticed none of them taught at a distance. We laughed aloud, thinking about teachers we thought were mean or too demanding. Perhaps we did not like them, yet we knew they cared. They lived within our communities physically, spiritually, and/or emotionally. They conjured stories that tied us to our past, demonstrating communal care. They also instilled an understanding that not caring had dire implications for all of us. Sadly, we both have visceral memories of schooling contexts without care, freighted with the kind of carelessness resulting in emotional violence, social death (forgetting of Black girls), and academic malpractice.
We both attended predominately White elementary schools and universities where we encountered hyperinvisibility and forms of isolation. We did not exist in the books, curricular examples, the lunchroom, or the playground (unless we were being disciplined). We were there, but as an absent presence. When this became too overbearing and stigmatizing, Rachel’s mother transferred her to an all-Black school. Roberta also attended an all-Black school for a time but then attended a predominately White private high school. However, as Iloabugichukwu (2018) argued, she barely survived. It was a place where wearing blackface and afro wigs was an acceptable way to show school spirit when Black schools were athletic opponents. These racially subversive acts were not only explicit but implicit. For example, an algebra teacher administered tests with new caveats disallowing makeup exams, intentionally punishing and undermining Black parents and students who chose to opt out of school to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, before it was legislated as a national holiday. Memories of these schooling experiences were a reminder of the absence of care and respect for Black students and families. They mirror Leong’s (2013) assertion that schools “commodify the racial and cultural identity of students and teachers while not providing structural or anti-discriminatory elements” (p. 2156). These forms of anti-Blackness occurred within school-sanctioned contexts. They exemplify how “violence and violation begets a will to forget . . . to forget the innards of that violation (Alexander, 2005, p. 276). Conversely, as Alexander argues, there is also love, which can inspire a vigorous form of remembering.
Stay with us, while we digress. While we contemplate the power of Black stories, and the power of remembering, our words, our world, our way. Our ways of knowing are worthy and they are worth remembering.
In their study examining oral narrative skills of emergent readers from multiple racial ethnic groups, Gardner-Neblett and Iruka (2015) discovered the storytelling capabilities of young Black children are varied, complex, and flexible. In fact, Black children’s storytelling abilities exceeded those of children from all other racial and ethnic groups. As we looked back, we remembered the power of showing and telling our stories, using our words, in our way. We remembered losing sleep thinking about what we would show and which story to tell. We remember how it felt to hear classmates talk about people, places, and things they loved—our world, our way. We argue that rather than silencing our students with seatwork in response to the myth children from working-class homes have a so-called 30 million–word gap (Alim & Paris, 2015), our classrooms should be sonic playgrounds and intellectual hubs for nurturing and collecting our children’s stories. We should bring them to life through recording, dictating, and writing them. We should use these stories to teach science, civics, geography, ecology, math, and art. In Rachel’s second-grade classroom, we used visual art as a thread for storying to enrich culturally sustaining literacy practices when budget cuts occurred. This meant her students would no longer receive art instruction as part of their “specials” rotation. Her administrator provided her with a key to the art room, allowing us access to art supplies to enter a different world.
Although we stumbled at first, as we explored the affective resonance and aesthetic wealth of Black visual stories across space and time, eventually we canvased joyful spaces in Rachel’s classroom. It became a space where all of us could remember, recall, and restore. As Alexander (2005) reminds us, literature and art offer a space of surreality and opportunity unbound by social constructions. It allowed opportunities for new memory work and reflection. In our recent present, we still remember. In a text sent on February 12, 2018, Rachel asked, “Did you see this?” The attachment was a side-by-side image of Michelle and Barack Obama’s official portraits. Within the visual fold of those images, Rachel recalled how 2 years before, we introduced the artist, Kehinde Wiley, to her students. We had discussed our phenotypic traits, sketched and painted portraitures of ourselves awash in multiple hues, with purple puffs of hair and a bevy of stars or birds in the background.
Art is treated as expendable; however, for Black people in America, it is a critical revolutionary tool for inspiring agency, self-definition, preservation, and integrity of our collective diasporic memory. Sometimes, as we planned for lessons or debriefed, we reflected on opportunity gaps and other forms of miseducation. These reflective pauses were important because we did not want to foster these forms of miseducation with our students. On many occasions, as we engaged in literacy explorations with Rachel’s students, we discovered we were looking at the art through the eyes of our younger selves. Studying rhetorical devices such as the gaze in Kehinde Wiley’s art, the meaning of distorted figures in Jacob Lawrence’s migration panels, or the contemporary artwork of Shanequa Gay reminded us of what we had missed in our own education. In these moments, we allowed our spirits to “touch our confused mind, pulling us back into blackness bringing us home” (Freeman, 1974, p. 69). Like Carothers (2014), it pushed us to ask, “What does it look like when a teacher has taught a Black child successfully?” (p. 6). We wondered also about the possibilities of expanding Black children’s literature and the role of Black art in supporting these efforts. These materials and practices were bolstering our memories and reflective racial consciousness. They were also creating a sense of vibrancy in Rachel’s classroom. Yet, despite the ways we were actually exceeding standards, there was always a sense Rachel would be second-guessed about whether the strategies were “really working.”
Infusing Rachel’s literacy block with drawing lessons, painting, photo-voice, and collaborative writing was a process, not a panacea. So, too, was our memory work. As we remembered, we hoped to expand literacy experiences that would linger for our students, in the present or not so distant future. As we oscillated between desired and required lessons, the memory of painting and writing and the affirmative communal sense created was our only defense. We took pedagogical risks while building defense rhetoric to respond to skeptical colleagues and administrators who attempted to micromanage her classroom (e.g., desk arrangements in rows rather than communal seating). In the university space, Roberta shared stories and videos from Rachel’s class demonstrating her students using orality and visuality in varied literacy contexts. It expanded conversations about factors narrowly circumscribing their literacy practices. As K. D. Brown (2018) discovered, millennial preservice teachers do not inherently know how racism influences schooling contexts. Through these discussions, they could see racism at work within school structures as we unpacked challenges about (un)acceptable methods for children in Title I urban intensive schools. Students, particularly, found these conversations important as they witnessed libraries and “specials” shuttered in their field placements, replaced by truncated curriculum without creative liberatory practices.
Care and Connectedness Through Culturally and Racially Conscious Mentorship
Relational processes of remembering in caring contexts diminish the harm of miseducation and emotional violence undermining who we are and what we know. Dillard (2012) reminds us we need inquiry honoring the complexities of memories (p. 10). Moreover, critical memory work should encompass the intersecting cosmologies of Black teachers intergenerationally across global contexts within and outside of schools. Stories centering cultural and racialized knowledge rightfully challenge limited pedagogical approaches and silos that deemphasize collaborative teaching and communal and familial learning practices—teaching what we learned from our mothers and their mothers (Pham, 2018) as one example. They also counter tropes that Black female teachers possess endless strength, “tireless support,” and emotional stamina. Culturally and racially conscious mentoring disrupts the flawed social order in schools that unnecessarily pushes Black teachers to find a way or make one, usually without sufficient contexts of care and support.
Our memories were instructive. They led us to create literacy engagements with less suffering and more creativity and care. As we “swam in the pool” of Black artistic genius, we were pushed to grow professionally and personally. We rediscovered parts of ourselves, and co-constructed curriculum disrupting notions that “childhood remembrances [in these schools] are always a drag if you’re black” (Giovanni, 1973, p. 46). Our conjured memories provided opportunities to expand dialogue and highlight structural factors limiting teaching contexts in urban intensive schools. Consciously and unconsciously, our memories and cultural knowledge matter. They shape what we sustain, repress, and pass on to students. Culturally and racially conscious mentoring also reminded us we were not alone in our struggle to make sense of the contradictions and misguided, multicultural (White-centered) frames and policies. These disconnected cultural constructs and reforms too often place Black and equity-focused educators in contentious positions where we are rewarded for our silence yet crushed in our spirit. We continue to ask questions about factors that influence teachers’ culturally relevant literacy teaching practices, and what elements help to sustain Black teachers in urban intensive schools. Caring about their needs, knowledge, and curiosities expands the language of schooling and reform. Perhaps most importantly, we must center the power of “culture to console” (Alexander, 2005, p. ix) as a reminder of our contributions, our value, and our worth; that is what we will remember most.
(Re)membering: A Journey of Two Latinx Teachers Moving Toward CSPs
I knew I wanted to be a teacher because of a story my mother told me about my own early childhood experiences. As a preschooler, I attended a bilingual (Spanish-English) school located in the basement of my family’s church. At kindergarten registration, my parents were informed by the new school’s administrative team to immediately stop speaking Spanish at home. Before even meeting me, they were convinced that speaking two languages would be confusing. However, the teacher recognized my capacity, largely due to my preparation and learning at preschool. When the teacher broke her leg, I ended up serving as the teacher’s helper. I excelled at school; in fact, the teacher suggested I skip a grade. At the age of 6, we moved from the city of Chicago to a predominately white suburban neighborhood. My older brother was getting into criminal activities, and my parents thought the suburbs would be a safer space for the family. What my parents didn’t consider was what it would be like for me—a Latina, Spanish-speaker growing up in a place where there were no children like me. Furthermore, my invisibility and isolation grew as I did not see myself reflected in the school curriculum. The struggles I faced pushed me to become a bilingual classroom teacher. As a young child, I had to show I was good enough. Without formal bilingual instruction, I had to cultivate and sustain my Spanish (both reading and writing) on my own. (Sandra) The daughter of a public-school teacher and a banana plantation worker, I grew up in La Lima, Honduras, a rural town surrounded by banana plantations and a banana processing plant. Top executives at this plant were Americans, and they established an American community within La Lima, “La Zona Americana” (The American Zone), as it was known. It had its own hospital, country club (golf course and restaurant), bowling alley, swimming pool, tennis courts, and best of all, its own K-8 school: La Lima American School or LLAS. Through a “giving back to the community” program, my older siblings and I gained access to bilingual education at this school. I only attended LLAS from K-3 because the school was sold to a private entity, making it unaffordable for my family to continue to enroll us there. In order to continue with our bilingual studies, my parents enrolled my siblings and me at an affordable bilingual school run by American missionaries. Being biliterate gave us access to study abroad opportunities and to a better education than would be afforded to a family of our socio-economic status in my country. Growing up, bilingualism was viewed as an asset, therefore, it was the most desirable education, affordable and accessible to only a select few. I became a bilingual teacher in the U.S. after noticing how many young adults of Latinx background in this country (the closest example being my own husband) knew little to nothing of their parents’ native language or culture. The educational system seemed to only prioritize the acquisition of English language skills for all students. I was concerned that this could become the legacy for my own children. (Sara)
These memories of our childhood fueled our pursuits toward teaching. Our educational experiences failed to value our cultural and linguistic practices, so much so that Sara did not even learn about her own country of Honduras during her bilingual schooling—an education that centered American culture. She now recognizes the indifference she felt toward her own Latino heritage, albeit unconscious and subtly formed. Despite the value of bilingualism in both Honduras and the United States, it seemed many teachers held a deficit mind-set regarding our cultural identities and practices as Latinas. In contrast, we strive to be teachers that value students’ funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005), including cultural and linguistic practices; and this pursuit requires us to look inward and make public our own memories and histories of schooling. Few research studies on education and teacher education programs center teachers’ voices (Llorens, 1994; Rentner et al., 2016), specifically the voices of teachers of Color. Teachers’ education has been viewed from a monocultural lens, given that, in 2012, 82% of the public-school teachers were White (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). By presenting two Latinx teachers who worked together in a dual-language (Spanish–English) classroom that sought to implement CSP, we center our stories and interrupt this lack of voice.
Like Roberta and Rachel, we focus on how the relationship between both teachers and our own memories supported the process of implementing CSPs. Sandra, a teacher-educator at a university, took up an additional role of cooperating teacher for the local elementary school who needed temporary assistance; Sara was a student teacher the first semester of the school year and assumed the role of teacher, on her own, the second semester of the academic year (explained further later). We knew that this relationship was important and meaningful because together, we would be supporting first-grade, dual-language (Spanish–English) students—students whose experiences were similar to our own. Our own knowing and being are rooted in and constantly informed by our past (Dillard, 2012), and this (re)membering of our past informed our relationship while leveraging our ability to implement CSPs. King and Swartz (2016) call for “re-membered” content and “re-membered” emancipatory pedagogies, . . . designed to produce group (and therefore individual) academic and cultural excellence, expand students’ heritage and cultural knowledge, teach agency, and create a shared commitment to the group’s well-being and belonging through just and right action. (p. 11)
To foster this sense of belonging with first-grade students, we knew we had to begin with ourselves and our relationship together.
In this section, we share some of the (re)memberings that (a) connect us to our heritage/cultural knowledges, events, and people; (b) demonstrate how these memories are intimate, personal, and shapers of our identities; and (c) show how these memories changed our present, specifically in the classroom. We share these (re)memberings as a way to demonstrate their importance in relationship-building between colleagues (teacher–teacher) and students. We have to know and recognize our past to leverage it for our future.
PDCRT
Sandra was part of PDCRT the previous year with a second-grade teacher. During that time, Sara was a part-time literacy specialist at the same school who supported several students in the second-grade teacher’s classroom through a pull-out structure. Sara was intrigued by the work Sandra and the other teacher were incorporating toward culturally relevant practices. Due to the unexpected departure of the teacher, Sandra volunteered to come back to the classroom, temporarily, as the lead teacher. During this year, Sara was completing her student teaching semester with Sandra, offering an opportunity for collaboration through PDCRT. The school’s plan was for Sara to take over the first-grade classroom as the teacher in January, once she graduated. Sandra took on the position of classroom teacher and Sara’s cooperating teacher, alongside her position as professor to alleviate the school’s predicament and to collaborate and think with Sara. Sara already had 6 years of teaching experience that included a year in a classroom setting as a social studies, science, and language arts Spanish teacher for fourth and fifth graders, and 5 years as a K-5 bilingual literacy interventionist and ESL teacher. Sara had entered the teaching profession through an alternative program that allowed her to have the rights and responsibilities of a certified teacher while holding a provisional teaching certificate. She was required to complete additional coursework and student teaching to obtain her standard teaching licensure. Given her varied experiences, Sandra saw Sara as more than a student teacher but as another teacher in the classroom with an equal voice for input and decision-making. At one point, our own children were part of the dual-language program; both of us also worked in this same school for some years prior to our collaboration together.
This was the first time that Sandra worked with a “co-teacher” as her previous experiences as an elementary educator were solo—She was the only teacher in the classroom with the ability to make all decisions. Although Sandra was nervous about how the relationship would unfold, in the end, it was a true blessing. It was great to have another teacher to talk ideas over. We both knew our students well, and we could talk about things we observed, what was working, what was ineffective, and what needed adjusting.
School Context
Lincoln Elementary School is located in a small urban community in Illinois. In the 2010 U.S. Census, 5.2% of the community’s total population of 41,250 identified as Latinx. The school houses one of two dual-language programs for the district. The school is a neighborhood school, meaning students are assigned based on where they live, except for students who are native Spanish speakers and choose to receive bilingual services. Those students are bussed to one of two schools that house the dual-language programs. In 2016, there were a total of 438 students at Lincoln across K-5. Of these students, 30.4% of them were classified as Latinx and 30.6% of them were classified as English learners by the state report card data (https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/).
During the 2016–2017 school year, our classroom had a total of 25 students. The school district divided students in the dual-language program into two groups: native Spanish speakers and native English speakers. According to these categories, there were 17 students considered native Spanish speakers and eight native English speakers in our classroom. These categories did not take into account children who were trilingual. One student was classified as a native Spanish speaker, but, in reality, Spanish was his third language. Another student, classified as a native English speaker, also knew Chinese and was acquiring Spanish in our classroom. The Spanish-speaking countries represented in our classroom by the children were Mexico and Guatemala, and the teachers represented Colombia and Honduras. Our students from Guatemala also spoke an Indigenous dialect.
“Re”membering
Many research studies (Emdin, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2009) discuss the importance of students of Color being reflected in the classroom curriculum; specifically, their heritage and community practices (Paris & Alim, 2017). Not only should students’ heritages, cultural, and linguistic practices be recognized but also that of Black and Brown teachers. As Black and Brown teachers, we were trying to give our students the education and affirmation that we never had. Toward this end, we (re)membered our past experiences as a way to implement emancipatory pedagogies in our first-grade classroom. We connected to our heritage/cultural knowledges, recognizing our memories as intimate, personal shapers of our identities and demonstrating how these memories influenced our classroom practices (King & Swartz, 2016).
We became bilingual (Spanish–English) teachers because of our own past and experiences growing up. We both felt that being bilingual was something that was a part of our identities even though we grew up in different locations. We were teachers and mothers and saw the deficit lens through which many individuals who spoke a language other than English are viewed. To implement CSPs (Paris & Alim, 2017), we both contended with and processed internalized oppressions. Undergirding our shared goals was a desire for our own students and children to retain and reclaim every aspect of their identity (such as speaking Spanish) to be successful in the United States. By better understanding ourselves, we were then able to better support our own students in understanding their various identities. These intimate and personal memories of our childhoods were important parts of our experiences. Our two stories of resilience and combating deficit thinking shaped our approach to helping students share their stories, draw heavily from their cultural knowledge as a strength, and mobilize cultural heritage as a tool for teaching peers and teachers.
Centering Ourselves and Our Latinx Students
Given our (re)memories and our own educational pasts and experiences, we were committed to a classroom that welcomed our students’ diverse backgrounds as Latinx students, in spite of the Eurocratic curriculum. As a former classroom teacher within this school for 8 years, Sandra was familiar with the limitations of curriculum. For example, in the scripted basal reading series, the Spanish version was a direct translation of the English version without much attention to content and culture. Out of about 20 stories, only one had a character that appeared to be Latinx. None of the stories discussed the experiences of a multilingual, bicultural individual. During the year of the project, the school instituted a balanced literacy model, giving teachers more choice on literature used in the classroom; yet, resources shared from the district were still from a Eurocratic view. We recalled how important it was for students to see themselves as valued and central to the classroom curriculum. Sandra remembered feeling happy when her second-grade teacher invited her mother into the classroom to present on her Colombian heritage. Even though her mother did not speak English well, she was still positioned as an asset. Even through the small gesture of inviting Sandra’s mother into the classroom, Sandra’s sense of belonging in that classroom space was impactful.
For Sara, because she attended an elementary school for the children of American executives working in La Lima, Honduras, the curriculum was the same as any other American school in the United States. Because she was receiving a bilingual education, it was considered to be a superior education in comparison with that of a regular Spanish-only school. In looking back as an adult, she recognizes that solely learning about the ideas and achievements of Western cultures prevented her from valuing and understanding the history of her own people and culture from an early age. In a way, she developed an unconscious bias of the superiority of White American culture and history over that of her Honduran heritage. These memories and reflections are what pushed us to ensure our Latinx students’ cultural and linguistic knowledges were centered in classroom curriculum. Therefore, we spent weeks before school started planning our first unit for the school year, discussing how we would anchor our students’ funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005) in the classroom.
Community and Curriculum
We started off the year with a unit on community, a required part of the social studies standards. Immigrating to new countries and moving to new schools were closely tied to our identity and sense of belonging in classrooms. That is, without recognition of our cultural identities, we often felt ignored and marginalized from our classroom community. In our view, community and immigration were interrelated topics, and so we ensured that our Latinx students’ experiences (and those of their families) were reflected in this unit. Typically, the standard community unit focused only on the neighborhood around the school and highlighted community helpers such as police officers, firemen, doctors, and so on. The majority of our Latinx students were bussed in from the far side of town, meaning the neighborhood around the school held very little relevance or connection to them. To include them in the discussion of the community, Sandra went out on weekends and took pictures of their neighborhood and visited places the students frequented. These photos were placed around the classroom and used for a wide range of activities, including memory discussions as a prewriting activity. Each student was to choose one picture and share a memory of that location with a partner. The partner was instructed to listen and ask questions to get more details. This provided students an opportunity to learn from each other. While there were some locations in the pictures that would have been familiar to our whole student population, there were other locations with which our Latinx student population had more familiarity. This positioned our Latinx students as knowledge-holders, capable of providing firsthand information about those places. If we limited our learning activities to the school neighborhood, a large portion of our class would be excluded. In discussing photographs from their own community, students became the experts of their own space.
In addition to physical and geographic space, the people who inhabit that space create community. In an effort to welcome families’ voices into our classroom, students completed family interviews asking their parents or guardians to describe the reasons for choosing to live in our area. As many of our students were immigrants, this was a way to connect home to school around the topic of immigration. Because students conducted interviews at home, the families shared as much (or as little) as they wanted. In addition to family interviews, Sandra and Sara tried various ways to get the families’ voices into the classroom space as valued resources. We implemented written activities, invited families into the classroom to share, and even visited them in their homes when invited. Families came into the classroom to discuss aspects related to our unit on community. This included welcoming families to discuss decisions to (im)migrate to specific locations, the varied contributions of their employment and work, and the values/practices of their families and communities. Like Sandra’s early memory of school, students loved seeing families in the classroom. It provided them an opportunity to ask questions and see the value of the resources their families possessed. However, Sandra and Sara knew that not all families would be able to visit the classroom during normal school hours, and they brainstormed ways those families could still be included. If families were unavailable during school hours, we would go to them. Families were given the option to have teachers visit them and video record their sharing during afterschool hours and even weekends. This provided an opportunity for everyone to participate and feel included. Collectively, the cultural and community knowledge provided by families enhanced our curriculum.
Facing our Fears
Wednesday, November 9, 2016, is a day neither one of us will forget. It was the day that the 45th president of the United States was announced. During this time of the year, Sara was already running the morning half of our classroom’s school day. On this day, Sandra walked in and asked, “What do you think we should do, Maestra (teacher)?” Sara had the whole morning planned out already, and it did not include discussion of our country’s presidential election results. Sara wrote in her reflective journal, “Clearly, I was not ready to ‘change’ the plans.” Neither one of us was really ready to speak about the current situation in our country, but from past experience, Sandra knew that the students would be talking about it with or without teacher support.
Upon debrief on how to approach the election result in the classroom, it was decided that Sandra would facilitate the conversation. At 8:10 a.m., the school bell rang and students started rapidly filling the hallways. It came as no surprise that one of our most vocal students ran down the hall yelling, “Donald Trump is president, Donald Trump is president!” Sandra responded by stating, “Yes, I know” and assured the student that they would talk about it in a minute. All the students settled at the carpet after choosing their lunch, as usual, and Sandra began the discussion:
¿Qué pasó anoche? (What happened last night?)
¡Donald Trump ganó! (Donald Trump won!)
¿ganó qué? (Won what?)
Nos va a sacar de la casa. (He is going to take us out of our home.)
No nos puede sacar a todos. Mi mamá no tiene papeles pero yo sí nací acá y mi hermanita, también. Entonces yo puedo ir a Guatemala y regresar. Yo sí tengo papeles porque yo nací acá. (He can’t take us all out. My mom doesn’t have papers but I was born here and my little sister, too. So I can go to Guatemala and return. I do have papers because I was born here.)
He wants to build a wall.
This discussion was something that neither of us was prepared for, but we knew we had to support our students as they shared their thoughts to make meaning of the situation. Sandra “re”members, when she was a fifth grader, her parents became U.S. citizens. Sandra does not recall living in fear of her parents’ deportation despite their citizenship status. Truthfully, Sandra did not even remember knowing her parents’ undocumented status. This was in stark contrast to our students’ reality. Even as young children, they knew the value of “having papers”; the media saturated the social landscape with images of children and caregivers being torn from each other. Inevitably, they also feared being kicked out of their homes and were reminded of government plans to “build a wall,” rhetoric propagated by the newly elected president. They were also aware of their own rights as citizens of the United States—They were born here and were afforded the right to stay and move between countries. As in the case of Elisa, she was both Guatemalan and American.
For Sara, she immigrated to the United States as a student to attend college with the financial and legal support of a host American family. Sara had become a naturalized U.S. citizen through marriage and remembered the tedious, costly, and stressful process involved in changing her legal status. Nonetheless, her experience and that of her own children differed dramatically from the one experienced by students and their families. Economic costs seemed to pale in comparison with the emotional and political trauma students were facing at this particular moment. As immigrants ourselves, we did not fear deportation procedures or the separation of any family member. Currently, deportation and family separation are all too real for immigrant families in the United States. Consequently, many of our students knew the immigration status of their parents and themselves, as their comments demonstrate above. Although our experiences differed from those of the students, we believe that deficit ideologies placed on us as well as the invisibility of our cultural backgrounds allowed us to support our students’ discussions on a topic closely related to their identities. The vignette above demonstrates how we centered our Latinx students’ experiences in our classroom. We did not shy away from the conversation. Throughout the year, we implemented different practices and curriculum that allowed our students to see themselves reflected in our classroom space. Leading up to this day, we read multiple books related to the topic of immigration, as well as news articles. We knew the presidential election, no matter the result, was going to affect our students. We made sure our classroom curriculum valued our students’ cultural and linguistic practices. Because we had not felt our lives as immigrants had been important enough to be part of the classroom curriculum in our own kreindergarten to 12(PK-12) education, we wanted to make sure we were not doing the same to our students.
Sandra remembers a speech she gave for an advanced placement (AP) English class in high school where she shared her father’s immigration story. After completing the speech, the teacher advised her not to share a story like that in public, especially if her father was undocumented. This made Sandra feel ashamed of her family’s story rather than feel pride for the sacrifices and resilience of her parents. She thought she was doing something wrong by opening up about her family’s background. Therefore, it was important that the students in this classroom felt seen and heard, unafraid to share these sensitive matters with their classroom community. Sandra and Sara were both comfortable adding to the conversation and supporting each other along with the students, taking the lead when the other felt unready. Their relationship was also built on trust and a shared commitment to broach difficult conversations. It was important to allow students to bring in different aspects of their identities into the classroom, feeling acknowledged and valued. Fortunately, we did not have to do this work alone because we shared the load together. Our teaching practices reflected our shared responsibility to create a safe space for our students to share openly and without judgment. The day after the election was one of those days where students needed to feel comfort, protection, and safety. Therefore, we threw out the academic plans for the day and, instead, gave students an opportunity to self-express through art using a variety of paints and paper. They were allowed to paint whatever they wanted, independently or in small groups. We just wanted a space for students to process their feelings and to continue the conversation in an informal, spontaneous setting, if they were so inclined. On this day, achieving academic goals was a secondary concern in favor of giving children the time and space to relax, play, and be in community with each other. The inclusion of art provided a space for students to take agency as they processed their feelings. We both recognized as teachers that the outside world affected the lived experiences of our students. Sandra remembered the negative response from her teacher regarding her immigrant identity, being made to feel wrong and improper when sharing her personal life. Rather than have our Latinx students experience this kind of inadequacy, we wanted them to see their Latinx identity and linguistic abilities as an asset, as something that filled them with pride.
Conclusion
As Black and Latina teachers, we understand firsthand that the diverse students in our schooling contexts are too often seen through a deficit lens. Our lived experiences pushed us to become teachers who see the inherent value in sustaining our students’ languages and lived experiences. (Re)membering our pasts allows us to see our present more clearly. We are reminded that loving children means respecting, valuing, and explicitly nurturing their language and literacies to build relationships to sustain them (and us) emotionally, intellectually, socially, and politically. Our experiences helped us to become teachers who implemented CSPs in the classroom as a human right (Paris & Alim, 2017). This required sustaining ourselves first. Too often, conversations about memory are nostalgic and static rather than agentive, active, and ongoing.
Our stories go beyond calls for more teachers of Color in a field where diverse teachers are underrepresented and tokenized in K-12 settings. We also move beyond articulating the benefits and advantages of diverse representation in classroom settings serving diverse children. We share our cultural memories and the pedagogical implications of these memories to reclaim our stories, specifically those that remain hidden until we are able to process them as adults, teachers, and teacher-educators. We might still be processing these identities as we continue to navigate White structural spaces within and outside of education. Holding onto our cultural identities means we remember our childhood(s)—the teachers who expanded and/or inhibited our cultural resources; the feelings of language loss and heritage that come with immigration; the affinity groups we form and cling onto for our own cultural sustenance. Teachers of Color are likely to have memories that have been silenced or suppressed because of the hurt these memories have caused, ranging from being viewed from a deficit lens to blatant racism. Therefore, we share our memories and the stories that connected us in intimate ways to encourage other teachers of Color to (re)member. This (re)membering is not for the benefit of other teachers, school administrators, or policy makers but for ourselves. As King and Swartz (2016) state, it is about “using knowledge of the past to act with agency in the present” (p. 21). Our own knowing is constantly informed by our past as powerful tools for activist teaching and praxis. Our participation in PDCRT allowed us to build a strong relationship and community together where we journeyed on the path of (re)membering to best support our Black and Brown students. By (re)membering our own past, we were better equipped to support students in acknowledging and presenting their own memories.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
