Transnational Friendships and Fluid Boundaries in Early Childhood Classrooms: The Possibilities of (Un)Productive Play in Teacher–Researcher Collaborations for Equity

Background: Urban Schools and Teacher Identities

In large urban settings like ours, there are several factors that create obstacles and barriers for teachers who are committed to equity and culturally relevant teaching, including scripted, narrow curriculum; administrative oversight and control; limited agency; continued de-professionalization; and little reward and support. As Stern and Brown (2016) capture in their profiles of activist teachers, “Listlessness, hopelessness, anxiety, and depression are almost logical products of this kind of environment—perhaps even intentional in a neoliberal model of flexible, low-pay labor” (p. 337). Teachers, and more specifically teachers of Color, are often called on to be superhuman—activists, politically conscious, strong, and critically aware of inequities (Matias & Liou, 2015). With calls for teachers to be all things to all children, we focus on teachers as relational beings with dis/likes, hopes, and interests of their own. Therefore, how do we create communities of care for teachers/teacher-educators to freely watch Shonda Rhimes’s shows, laugh at silly jokes, and unwind from the weariness and exhaustion of activism? Beyond acceptable forms of self-care, how do relationships weave in and out of political solidarities and commitments to the less respectable acts of play? How do playful relationships create spaces for vulnerability and openness, especially when dealing with serious and painful issues? In pursuing these lines of inquiry, we reframe and stretch definitions of play. Play is often limited to images of fun and laughter, rather than taken seriously as aesthetic, creative, and emotional.

While not all of us will rehash episodes of the Kardashians or the nefarious rivalries and toxic love between Cookie and Lucious from Empire (Daniels & Strong, 2015), personal connection via popular culture connects people in intimate ways. We honored and encouraged what some would consider unintellectual practices and made ourselves vulnerable to potential judgment. Furthermore, it was an invitation to participate fully in our lives outside of the classroom while creating an opening to interact in authentic ways. Rather than put on facades that are “pretentious and masquerading” (Johnson et al., 2018, p. 54), we feel that our engagements with popular culture and exposure of our less-than-perfect ways blurred power hierarchies that are prevalent in relationships like ours. In this article, we outline our own identities as women of Color and the interplay of our multiple identities with teaching, learning, and research. Before featuring classroom vignettes around identity and politics, we begin with these stories of border crossing as a way to situate our work.

Transnational Feminism: Collaboration Along Social, Cultural, and Academic Borders

We began with our own childhood memories and stories of border crossings as first-/second-generation immigrants as these politically uncertain times are reminiscent of our stories of immigration, marginalization, and fear. Drawing from transnational feminist perspectives and King and Swartz’s notion of collective responsibility (2015), we unpack teacher activism both in and out of the classroom. While providing culturally relevant practices for children was the center of the project, we focus on our dyad relationship—the emotional, intellectual, political, and playful dimensions of deeply personal work. We share about joint achievements, victories, and tensions in producing academic products, reflecting on race/color in classroom conversations, and navigating the 2016 elections. At the same time, we place importance on sharing in the struggle for equity, leaning on each other, and the power of interdependence as friends and teachers. Although the transformative potential of education describes accurately the moral fabric of our work (Nieto, 2001), we make a case for flexible, free, and intimate spaces for collaboration that center our commitment and accountability to one another across professional and personal contexts.

We explain our collaboration through a transnational feminist lens as both our stories illustrate movement across borders. Focused on the production of knowledge across geographic, social, cultural, professional, and political borders, transnational feminists critique Westernized conceptions of feminism as exclusive to White, monolithic ways of being. Instead, women’s roles and identities across geopolitical spaces vary in scope. While located in U.S. contexts, we understand our identities and allegiances are cultivated and shifted by an “intersectional set of understandings, tools, and practices” (Nagar & Swarr, 2010, p. 5). For both of us, ethnic affiliations, cultural practices, languages, and/or immigrant status move between the foreground and the background at different moments of our lives. Throughout this article, we show how different aspects of our identity gain significance within different contexts, and we employ a collaborative, reflexive stance to make sense of these instances together.

We are negotiating our identities as Puerto Rican, Korean, American, wife, mother, daughter, teacher, and academic. On some days, one identity marker is more prominent than others, dependent on positions we take up (Belford & Lahiri-Roy, 2018). In addition, first-/second-generation immigrant women (an identity marker we both take up) are grappling between spaces with ties to parents’ homelands and our own coming-of-age in the United States. As a consequence, transnational and immigrant women sequester their ethnic and cultural lives within their home and/or homelands (Minh-Ha, 1987). Transnational feminism, however, encourages women to preserve their cultures across geographic borders while also maintaining practices within varied allegiances.

Therefore, we do not purport to share common racial, ethnic, gendered, linguistic struggles; we avoid generalizing immigrant experiences into a common set of oppressions. Instead, we emphasize the “common struggle toward liberation and the recognition of common interests that unite women cross-culturally, rather than an assumption of shared oppression” (Nguyen et al., 2016, p. 13). Across these social identities, we build alliances through opening up our experiences, relating to one another’s struggles, and constructing a coalition around shared visions on teaching and learning. We take up Nguyen and her colleagues’ notion of “epistemic friendships” based on “shared politics, rather than shared identities . . . marked by a desire to push one another toward greater, more effective, more nuanced political work for radical justice” (p. 14). These friendships are not only explicitly tied to different locations (e.g., culturally and geographically), but also sustained through diverse experiences. While our friendship was also an informal space, we accomplished “academic and pedagogical goals” (Nguyen et al., 2016, p. 25) that became personal commitments to each other just as much as it was a commitment to the work.

The practice of genuine accountability and commitment also comes from sharing data, transcripts, ideas, and “academic products” (Nagar & Swarr, 2010, p. 8). We acknowledge how sticky and complex this is, given the production pressures of the neoliberal university (Yoon & Templeton, 2019). In academia, knowledge is represented in specific ways (e.g., single-authored articles), legitimizing individual merit rather than collective knowledge production and representation (Nagar & Swarr, 2010; Nguyen et al., 2016). We present this article as our collective work, and our relationship/friendship/partnership is a testament and contribution to the feminist project. As Alexander and Mohanty (2010) suggest, hierarchies are “mythically fixed” (p. 27) when the academy is centrally recognized as the source of knowledge and intellectual production. These “hierarchies of place” (Alexander & Mohanty, 2010, p. 29) privilege theoretical knowledge over the ideas cultivated and sustained in the field. We interrupt the status of theory at the cost of marginalizing practice, yet we do not diminish the value of theories in understanding the inequities and experiences of schooling, specifically in early childhood education. There are multiple sites where knowledge is (re)produced and various interlocutors—children, teachers, parents, teacher-researchers, administrators, and other school personnel—contribute a tremendous amount of insight into the daily life of school. In the next section, we review the literature on collaboration and knowledge production with a goal of more authentic and loving partnerships.

Literature Review: Teacher–Researcher Collaborations

Transnational feminisms and the Afrocentric concepts of collective responsibility and shared agency (King & Swartz, 2015) are inextricably linked, undergirded by the centrality of indigenous knowledges. Decentering whiteness and learning from the practices and narratives of people of Color are instructive and integral in forming and sustaining teaching and research partnerships. An Afrocentric stance assumes that everyone has something to offer and contribute to classroom communities and, specifically, creates space for nondominant ways of being. In this literature review, we explore how whiteness is normalized in collaborative spaces, adding to tensions that privilege researcher knowledge and reinforces hierarchies between theory and practice. Didactic and unilateral professional development is well-documented as ineffective in fostering professional learning and cultivating teacher leadership; yet, it is still a standard practice in many schools (Clandinin, 2015; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Jackson & Knight-Manuel, 2019). Hamza et al. (2018) illustrated the problems with professional development implemented without the shared and distributed agency emphasized by King and Swartz (2015). Initial planning meetings revealed disparity among the group’s practices, priorities, and interests. Teachers had very little time to spare after fulfilling their other responsibilities, whereas researchers had more flexibility and arguably more to gain. There was an unequal balance of power and rewards, reifying hierarchies present in teacher–researcher collaborations. The researchers claimed much more authority, and inflexible agendas created little room and space for contributions from teachers. Therefore, it is unsurprising that teachers seemed detached and resistant to the work.

Chandler-Olcott and Hinchman (2015) collaborated with three teachers to implement literacy interventions for struggling seventh graders at the request of an urban school district’s superintendent. The researchers facilitated planning sessions during the summer and “co-planned” with teachers once a week during the school year. However, professional development was done to teachers rather than considered with them; their knowledge was not valued during the design phase of the project. Despite committed planning times, the group failed to develop trust and shared vision. The teachers did not adhere to the coteaching model the researchers designed and, in turn, the researchers did not intervene to support the teachers. In both cases, reciprocal and dialogic exchange of knowledge, expertise, and conceptualization was missing (King & Swartz, 2015).

Herrenkohl et al. (2010) offer a different approach based on their 10-year teacher–researcher collaboration. Initially, they established defined roles—Herrenkohl as the researcher and Kawasaki and Dewater as the science teachers. However, this arrangement was short-lived as Herrenkohl quickly became engaged in the classroom discussions and regarded by the students as a teacher. As Herrenkohl took up the teacher role, the two teachers took up the researcher roles as well. Kawasaki and Dewater participated in data collection and analysis, presented at conferences, published articles, and pursued advanced degrees. The group was sustained by a shared vision, they supported one another’s intellectual and emotional goals, they fluidly moved in and out of varied roles, and they destabilized hierarchies of power and status. In creating these conditions, there was more space for honest critique and dialogue between members of the team.

Hamza et al. (2018) and Chandler-Olcott and Hinchman (2015) contend that in attempting to honor teachers’ competence and expertise, they withheld feedback and support from the teachers to avoid undermining them and moved ahead with problematic agendas. Arguably, more positive or productive outcomes might have been achieved with more dedicated time to cultivating relationships and establishing spaces for honest dialogue. Epistemic friendships (Nguyen et al., 2016) could have reimagined the research projects described here by focusing on disrupting hierarchies and reinventing research goals. Critical and epistemic friendships not only support and elevate one another’s strengths, but they also lovingly critique and help each other through difficulty and confusion. Rather than stay within didactic borders of traditional research epistemologies, these studies reveal the importance of disrupting and humanizing research in the sociopolitical space of school (Paris & Winn, 2013). Important to successful partnerships, then, is the willingness to move between “complementary and overlapping roles and perspectives” (Herrenkohl et al., 2010, p. 85).

Among other considerations for establishing successful collaborations is nurturing equitable partnerships among teachers and researchers (Chandler-Olcott & Hinchman, 2015; Hamza et al., 2018; Herrenkohl et al., 2010). Reimer and Bruce (1994) note that equitable partnerships begin with identifying epistemological and ethical commitments as foundational to the teacher–teacher researcher collaboration. Understanding another person’s standpoints and ideological positioning are crucial to sustaining any kind of relationship claiming collective humanity (King & Swartz, 2015). Reimer and Bruce (1994) assert that relationships take time, disagreement is inevitable, and research projects often shift organically and unexpectedly as collaborations take shape. As transnational feminism connotes, power is always at play and impossible to ignore, yet Reimer and Bruce (1994) encourage collaborations to “strive to achieve parity in research relationships” (p. 219). We believe that the expressed commitment and goal of more equitable partnerships holds collaborative relationships together.

University–school partnerships are wrought with unequal power dynamics and relational tensions—challenges highlighted by Campano et al. (2015). They advocate for “research alongside, rather than merely on” (p. 30), specifically to mitigate the tendency for universities to design studies and offer professional development that undermine teacher knowledge. Drawing from transnational feminist epistemologies, they highlight the necessity of trust and respect in creating ethical partnerships. While developing norms, shared goals, and clear expectations (Reimer & Bruce, 1994) were important, Campano and his colleagues were flexible and open to reenvisioning the project, taking into account “new experiences and the evolving input of interested parties” (Campano et al., 2015, p. 33). We also stress the “relational labor” (p. 34) involved in cultivating truly democratic, dialogic, and dynamic partnerships. The epistemic and ethical considerations outlined by Reimer and Bruce (1994), Campano et al’s commitment to participatory research, and King and Swartz’s (2015) call for collective humanity and action certainly contributed to the success of our collaboration.

Context of Our Work

In this section, we describe both the formal and informal ways that our relationship grew; however, we begin with the importance of institutional support in constructing structures of visibility for people of Color (Ahmed, 2017). Visibility acts as a measure of value, and the investment of time, money, and resources to PDCRT served as an expressed commitment to lifting up teachers of Color. The objectives of the collaboration and expectations from the teacher, teacher-educator, and their respective administrations were clearly outlined (Reimer & Bruce, 1994). However, within these guiding frameworks, there was freedom to shape the collaboration as each partnership saw fit. The goal of culturally relevant frameworks is to counter deficit ideologies that often marginalize students who do not fit an arbitrarily defined norm. Under this overarching theme, individual dyads were given the freedom to conceive of projects and lines of inquiry within their contexts. In our case, culturally relevant also related to disabilities as several students in the classroom were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Disability studies, then, also provided an expansive definition of culture, including the historical oppression and exclusion of people with disabilities both in and out of the school (Baglieri et al., 2011). While these stories center our relationship(s) and reflections as teachers and researchers, we situate our work briefly within the school context.

Writing About Lucas’s Life: Bringing Together Home, School, and Community

We were energized by the intellectual and cultural affordance of play the first year. Our classroom life in kindergarten was certainly an endless source of stories, constructed by our students’ affinity for popular culture, their vast imaginations, and their individual narratives. Throughout the school year, we watched and became slightly obsessed with researching and engaging with Star Wars and were introduced to television shows flooding the children’s media market. Engaging in the children’s play ourselves, we learned a great deal about the current incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the subsequent power of shared, cultural knowledge. As scholars point out (Alvermann et al., 2003; Fiske & Hancock, 2016; Vasquez, 2003), popular culture is elusive and difficult to keep up with, but it is essential to understanding how culture is created and transformed. That is, popular culture should be studied and researched seriously, especially with young children whose interests are often dismissed as just frivolity and play (hooks, 2006).

The ensuing summer, while taking a course with Haeny, Carmen examined the ways popular culture created spaces for children to navigate and negotiate complex social issues (Dyson, 1997; Paley, 2009). She explored and wrote about the themes of gender bending, defiance of heteronormative culture, subversive humor, and inclusivity within Pee-wee’s Playhouse. A popular culture phenomenon from our childhoods, it is still relevant today even after 30 years. Little did Carmen know at the time that her inquiry into Pee-wee’s shenanigans, eccentricities, and nonconformity would result in a paper later submitted for admission to the doctoral program at Teachers College. For Carmen, infusing childhood memories and popular culture provided a new lens for merging play (throughout our lifetime) with theoretical, intellectual thought.

Common interests in play and popular culture inspired us to write and share about Lucas (a child diagnosed with ASD) and challenge the stereotypical ways (e.g., savant, socially awkward, and inexpressive) in which individuals with ASD are often represented, highlighting instead the intellectual and social acuity evident in his play, storylines, sense of humor, and empathetic nature (Yoon et al., 2016). In writing about Lucas, we felt strongly that his family should have a voice in how he was portrayed and hence, Lucas’s mother, Emma, became our coauthor and friend. Throughout the process of writing about Lucas, our shared perspective on his strengths or his “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) was the most significant to convey. Writing was both intellectual and emotional work for us. It not only allowed our relationship to grow, but it also gave Emma the space to reflect and process her own emerging emotions about her son. Writing together was both an intellectual, professional, and personal endeavor for all of us, and for varied reasons. Carmen was beginning to find her academic voice by theorizing the practices that informed her instruction. She discovered that pop culture and play were topics that academics wrote about (Dyson, 1997; hooks, 2006; Jenkins, 2007), and the depth in which we explore these topics offered limitless possibilities of joy and challenge. Although writing an article for a peer-reviewed journal was par for the course in Haeny’s life as an academic, it certainly was not something Carmen ever envisioned doing. Academic writing seemed detached from the personal; daunting and highbrow rather than humanizing and pleasurable. Writing together became an additional and equally important entry point for shared work. This was where we brought play and publication together in ways that were fluid and blurry.

Looking back, the article was an act of love that allowed each of us to see Lucas from one another’s vantage points. Emma shared with us the personal story of her father’s death and Lucas’s role in immortalizing him in his drawing of the Star Destroyer. Hanging in their living room wall was a framed drawing by Lucas of him and “Pop-pop” exploring new frontiers. While we all knew of Lucas’s obsession with Star Wars, Emma described stories of Lucas creating intricate and elaborate play scenes around Star Wars, organizing and including his peers in dramatic play, and inspiring others, including adults, to share in his enthusiasm. In writing this article, we all recounted stories of Lucas inviting us to join his world. Needless to say, each of us shared and learned stories of Lucas that resisted static narratives of children with ASD. This article (see Yoon et al., 2016) was a step toward making our practices public and opened up the boundaries between theory, practice, and play. Our intellectual pursuits now included academic writing, in addition to curricular design and pedagogical practices. In this sense, we were beginning to merge our spaces of the university, school, and home together.

Colorism and Privilege: Feeling White Against a Black and Brown Backdrop

From our writing pursuits, we move to critical conversations that resonated with us even after the project ended. The following excerpt is from a read-aloud time of Duncan Tonatiuh’s (2014) book Separate Is Never Equal, featuring the story of Sylvia Mendez, a Mexican/Puerto Rican girl whose denial into a “Whites only” school sparked community activism in California to end desegregation—10 years before Brown vs. Board of Education. In the book, Tonatiuh explores the tensions faced by Sylvia related to skin color, linguistic background, and family structure. Skin color became a recurring topic of conversation several times throughout the course of the school year, and it found relevance again on this day. The illustrations in the book confused the children—all the characters were Mexican, but they were confused by the various skin shades. Haeny shared her own story of isolation as a young child growing up in Chicago.

I (Haeny) remember this conversation vividly as I was struck by how the students in the class viewed me. My childhood, as described earlier, was marked by my quest for invisibility. Similar to Sylvia, I related to the push and pull of separate identities—the ones that tie us to our home communities and the ones that we take up to fit in. Although my skin color and ethnic affiliation would never allow me to be part of the dominant culture, I tried to deny my difference in other ways—refusing to speak Korean in public, demanding to eat spaghetti instead of kimchi, and hiding my weekend/family plans from my classmates. These tensions still exist as I move between comfort and discomfort in certain social spaces. It was surprising to me when the students were debating my assumed whiteness. I was never considered White growing up, but here I was in a classroom of Black and Brown children classified as White. The children did not see me as one of them and, for a moment, I felt excluded from the marginalized group. I almost felt as if I had to convince them that I wasn’t White when all my life, I was trying to convince White people that I was just like them. Therefore, the shade of our skin factors into degrees of privilege.

Skin color undeniably creates hierarchies of privilege that date back to slavery. While Black people were enslaved by White slave owners, they were also cast as beautiful, smart, or more capable depending on the lightness of their skin (Hunter, 2016; Jordan, 2013), what Hunter (2016) terms the “halo effect.” This halo effect attributes positive qualities and feelings to light-skinned students, which in turn provides them with more access to teachers, resources, time, and attention. Therefore, the children calling me “peach” or “pink” or “white” brought me closer to characteristics usually ascribed to White, Anglo people. Carmen and I did not believe that the children thought I was White; in fact, their perceptions and knowledge of me was far more nuanced than the conversation described above. However, colorism is a subtle and normalized classification of people, reinforced by White people as well as people of Color.

We reflected often throughout the year about colorism as children seemed to use this to racialize one another. We thought about how to mitigate some of these false presumptions as oppression is not just about skin color but tied to languages, heritages, cultural practices, gender, sexuality, and religious affiliations. Racism is not just invoked by color, but also by other “physical features, cultural characteristics and origins, and status as ‘native’ or ‘non-native’” (Alcoff, 2003, p. 25) that reproduce similar exclusionary barriers. However, there were other instances where our best efforts to explain this felt insufficient; their sense of identities was so deeply tied to skin color within and across racial affiliations. Truthfully, light skin is desirable in many communities of color (Hunter, 2016), including our own—White skin is revered and privileged in Asian culture and “White-passing” Latinas are often given more cultural capital and social power.

Furthermore, racial/ethnic characteristics are also connected to other intersectional markers (Crenshaw, 1991). Some of the children in this classroom will feel the weight of being Black, darkskinned, and male in a society that dehumanizes and criminalizes Black boys even at a young age (Dumas & Nelson, 2016). Some of the Latinx children will experience firsthand how prejudice toward their language, culture, color, and homelands can also manifest themselves into politics and rhetorics of hate and exclusion. Therefore, stereotypes (e.g., model minority myths) and subtle racism (e.g., prejudice toward darkskin) are not only historically rooted, but also sustained through political policies (e.g., immigration exclusion acts—see Goodwin, 2010), nationalist rhetoric (e.g., #immigrationbans; border walls), and narrowed curricular ideologies (Yoon, 2013). I (Haeny) cannot claim to understand the historical and contemporary oppressions that situate the Black/Brown experience. The conversation above clearly reminded me that the systemic inequities the children in this classroom will face are very different from the inequities I faced. Thus, this conversation caused me discomfort and renewed challenge. The “simple act of articulating—naming out loud—the existence of multiplicities of lived experiences, identities, and histories” (Goodwin, 2010, p. 3126) allows people of color to come together as a community, owning our various privileges and systemic favors while creating alliances of power. The issues children raised forced us to confront our own tensions with ethnicity, heritage, and privilege. The conversation did not end there but seeped into the ways we were processing our own identities as teachers and researchers. They challenged us to (re)examine exclusions within our cultural heritage groups and (inter)national identities—conversations that remain unfinished and complicated even now.

The residual effects of colorism affect us in similar and different ways. We come back to this conversation in some form or another at different points of our friendship. Sometimes, these conversations are productive and richly complex as we explore interactions with those within and across our ethnic communities. At other times, we talk about the silly and possibly embarrassing ways that we dealt with colorism: investing in Korean beauty products, developing crushes on light-skinned actors, falling into the trappings of marketing, and recognizing that advertisement and media locally and globally promote White skin. And in our most vulnerable moments, we shared with each other how we fall into normative perceptions of beauty and appearance. That is, these tensions are ongoing and we used our friendship as a space to confess and process feelings, contradictions, and imperfect beliefs.

Abuela Leaves the House to Vote: Democracy and Disappointment

Finally, we close with the tenuous political moment and the election of Donald Trump. In this example, we highlight Carmen’s personal stories from her childhood in Puerto Rico as a way to situate and mediate difficult conversations with young children. Carmen and Nate, like many teachers across the nation, were responsible for facilitating children’s understanding of the election results. They created space for children to discuss their thoughts, feelings, and confusions, knowing that conversations were happening regardless of whether or not the teachers were involved. In fact, one of the kids walked in that morning and confidently said, “Dump Truck won. He’s going to take us back to the old days.” While some teachers in many schools made decisions on banning election talk, we allowed children the space to speak and, more importantly, helped them process their un/warranted fears and mis/interpretations. The following is a short excerpt from their conversation the morning after the election.

The anxiety and confusion the students felt after the 2016 presidential election was palpable in the classroom. We dedicated considerable time to learning about the political process and discussing the candidates’ platforms. The children, like many adults, were confident that the first female president would be in office. After all, they learned political leaders upheld standards of morality and justice for every citizen. In this conversation, they recalled the great lengths women went through to secure their right to vote. They mourned the loss of their beloved President Obama and expressed disbelief in the election outcomes. Our students’ questions and reactions, particularly Sienna’s, compelled me (Carmen) to share my grandmother’s story. I countered their feelings of disappointment over the electoral process and reiterated the importance of participating in the democratic process. I hoped to illustrate this message by providing some connection, albeit via me, with my grandmother who valued her right to vote above so many other things.

The women’s suffrage movement began in Puerto Rico during the late 19th century (Delgado & Matos Rodríguez, 1998). Isabel, my maternal abuela, grew up witnessing rallies and marches advocating for women’s right to vote. Her father, a landowner dedicated to agriculture, was very involved in politics, and at a young age, Isabel became well versed on the island’s political landscape. I doubt that he was interested in Isabel becoming involved in any political movements. He deemed a ninth-grade education more than sufficient for a young woman and, in alignment with the patriarchal norms imposed on her, my abuela married at the age of 18. Isabel’s life was dedicated to tending to her husband’s needs and raising her six children. Yet she did not neglect her intellect. In 1929, after many failed attempts, the women’s suffrage movement was partially successful in getting a bill passed, granting literate Puerto Rican women the right to vote (Delgado & Matos Rodríguez, 1998). My abuela was one of the privileged women who cast her vote in the subsequent 1932 election; it wasn’t until 1935 that all women were given that right.

Both the maternal and paternal sides of my family have a long history of active involvement in Puerto Rican politics. Family members have held public office, campaigned arduously for political candidates, and worked the polls on election day. Politics was an incessant topic of conversation at family gatherings, whether it was Sunday lunch at my abuela’s house, a cousin’s birthday party, or a relative’s funeral. Given Puerto Rico’s history of colonial rule, election day was revered in my family. The right to elect our leaders was hard-earned by our ancestors and it was our duty to honor their efforts and vote.

In her older years, my abuela rarely left her home. She would babysit her grandchildren, host Sunday lunch, and entertain friends and relatives on her balcón in the evenings. She declined invitations to go shopping, visit relatives, attend plays and graduations, and even missed all of her grandchildren’s weddings. There were, however, two occasions for which she would primp up and leave her house—medical appointments and election day.

We share this story as a prime example of making the political personal, both in a literal and figurative sense. We opened with Marah asking us personal questions about our television habits and weekend plans, and we end with Carmen sharing a personal story of politics and voting in her Puerto Rican family. Along the way, we emphasize how crucial play was in deepening our friendship, building trust, and fostering safe spaces. By the end of our collaboration, we genuinely saw each other as more than PDCRT partners. Politics and colorism are not necessarily playful and comical topics, they are quite the opposite. However, the space to voice these deeply personal (sometimes painful) stories could only come with safety and trust. Answering questions about our personal habits and interests brought us greater intimacy and connection with children and each other. Our friendship overflowed into the classroom, creating the conditions for children to ask difficult questions, process emotions, clarify misunderstandings, and feel safe to express a range of feelings. The nonacademic, and perhaps lowbrow activities, gave us the safety and courage to open up other parts of our lives, to acknowledge where we fell short, and to openly admit our contradictions.

Conclusion: The Possibilities of Collaborative Friendship

We view our 2 years of collaborative curricular work as an intimate look into our process as teachers and partners, and we continue to support each other as pedagogical, political, and now academic colleagues. Through our shared experience as teacher/teacher-researcher, we reflect back on the “messiness of feeling emotions and acknowledging and working through contentious issues” (Basarudin & Bhattacharya, 2016, p. 44). We are motivated not only by an accountability to one another—a political and social commitment to social justice teaching, but also a commitment to listen and be there for each other when these commitments become emotionally draining and exhausting. At times, we dug into curricular texts and felt productive as curriculum makers—critiquing the whiteness of curriculum, facilitating tough conversations, and recentering materials/structures/interactions toward culturally relevant practices. At other times, our meetings were preoccupied with television shows, weekend plans, and tangential stories that made for seemingly unproductive planning. Rather than viewed as a waste of time, we see these moments as relational work that deepened our bond and opened up spaces for vulnerability. Thus, we encourage fluid, boundary-crossing where play and work are not seen as binaries but interconnected and vital to critical work, as is true for children (Paley, 2009). Although we fail to provide a model for professional development, we offer a way of being and interacting that disrupts rigidly set agendas, narrowed measures of productivity, and standardized outcomes.

Employing a transnational feminist praxis, we build alliances and empathy; we form friendships rather than simply partnerships. While we began this journey as acquaintances who were paired up because our pedagogical commitments seemingly matched, we formed a friendship that went beyond the borders of the research questions or the classroom project. It is what Nagar (2014) defines as “radically vulnerable” through a willingness to re/define boundaries and hierarchies. As many transnational feminists note, power is always at play in our relationships (Alexander & Mohanty, 2010; Minh-Ha, 1987; Mohanty, 2003). Yet we join with Nagar and Swarr (2010) who encourage destabilizing hierarchies between the researcher and the researched—making these boundaries blurry, thus truly dialogic.

Knowledge is produced in collaboration with others. Similar to other feminist scholars, we question research that draws distinct boundaries between those “on the ground” and those collecting research to preserve as much objectivity as possible. The idea of participant observer or detached (but warm) researcher was the perspective that most academics grew up learning about in ethnographic traditions and fieldwork (Geertz, 1973). As illustrated in this article, it was impossible to maintain one static identity as critically conscious work relies on all participants (teachers, researchers, children, and parents) to fully engage in social action. Therefore, sitting back and watching was not an option that either of us could or wanted to take up. We were both deeply involved in each of the stories that we shared.

“Epistemic friendships challenge us to extend the conceptual borders of how and with whom knowledge is produced and, in turn, where it is produced” (Nguyen et al., 2016, p. 21). This meant that traditional research boundaries, questions, and researcher positionalities were disrupted in favor of strengthening the collaboration. Preserving and cultivating our relationship, at times, took precedence over the research, pedagogy, and curriculum. Most importantly, our work was strengthened by one another—our writing, our teaching, and our research. Therefore, we firmly believe that lifting one another up was the goal of our collaboration.