This chapter reviews critical areas of research on issues of equity/equality in the highly proclaimed and exponentially growing model of bilingual education: two-way immersion (TWI). There is increasing evidence that TWI programs are not living up to their ideal to provide equal access to educational opportunity for transnational emergent bilingual students. Through a synthesis of research from related fields, we will offer guidelines for program design that attend to equality and a framework for future research to push the field of bilingual education toward creating more equitable and integrated multilingual learning spaces. Specifically, this review leads to a proposal for adding a fourth goal for TWI programs: to develop “critical consciousness” through using critical pedagogies and humanizing research.

Two-way dual language (TWDL) bilingual education programs share 3 core goals: academic achievement, bilingualism and biliteracy, and sociocultural competence. This article proposes a fourth core goal: Critical consciousness. Although TWDL programs are designed to integrate students from diverse language, culture and race backgrounds, equity is unfortunately still a challenge in TWDL classrooms and schools. We argue that centering critical consciousness, or fostering among teachers, parents and children an awareness of the structural oppression that surrounds us and a readiness to take action to correct it, can support increased equity and social justice in TWDL education. We elaborate 4 elements of critical consciousness: interrogating power, critical listening, historicizing schools, and embracing discomfort. We illustrate these elements with examples from TWDL research and practice. In addition, we describe how critical consciousness impacts and radicalizes the other three core goals, in turn supporting the development of more successful, equitable, and socially just TWDL schools.

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This article presents the testimonios of two high school girls coming of age in one of the most marginalized areas of Ciudad Juárez, México who attend a school with a critical pedagogy orientation (Freire, 1970). Ciudad Juárez is a city on the U.S-México border and considered one of the most violent in the world today. These testimonios shed light on the life experiences and identity formation of young women coming of age in the south side of the border and reveal the knowledge and wisdom they have gained in their struggle for freedom, dignity, and life. They also expose the epistemological and pedagogical nature of young women's discourse and wisdom characterized by testimonios as counter-narratives, confessions, and consejos; and the role of a critical school in promoting such discourse. This article offers insight into the potential of schools to become sites of organic healing, critical consciousness, and agency in dystopic times by cultivating the use of testimonios as a way to center and legitimize subaltern knowledge.The eyes of the world have been on Ciudad Juárez, México for the last few decades. Images and stories of crime, feminicides 1 , violence, impunity, gendered cheap labor, drug trafficking, industrialization, and social inequalities abound in the literature and popular culture depicting this city along the U.S.-México border. Despite the numerous analyses that exist about Juárez, the voices of youth are typically absent. This article presents the testimonios of two high school girls coming of age in one of the most marginalized areas of Juárez. These testimonios offer salient depictions of experiences, identity formation, and epistemologies on the south side of the border where women's freedom is constantly contested and poor youth are continuously criminalized. Yet, their testimonios offer a language of hope and insight into the potential of schools to promote healing, critical consciousness, and agency in dystopic times. Through their testimonios, these young Juárez women use counter-narratives to interrupt the media-driven discourse, raise consciousness, and reclaim their humanity. Moreover, their testimonios have become part of a habitual discourse of confessions and consejos 2 , which they use as a pedagogical instrument for survival, healing, and collective learning. This article utilizes testimonio as a way to bring to the surface a narrative of urgency in the dystopic condition of Juárez and a potential tool to decolonize pedagogical and research practices. These ideas are grounded on Moraga and Anzaldúa's (1981) notion of "theory in the flesh" (p. 23), an organic theory that emerges in urgency and that privileges the real experiences, voices, and knowledge of subaltern women of color demanding attention and action. This is a "struggle of the flesh, and struggle of borders, an inner war" (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 100) in which women's brown bodies are the mediums, witnesses, and agents (Cruz, 2001). Brown bodies thus constitute the very sites of collision between the First and Third Worlds an...

Based on Walter Mignolo’s (2000) notion of border thinking , that is, the subaltern knowledge generated from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system, this article extends current conceptual frameworks for the implementation of a decolonizing border pedagogy with Latin@ students in secondary schools. In particular, Cervantes-Soon and Carrillo draw from their own positionalities as border pedagogues, from Mestiz@ theories of intelligences (Carrillo, 2013) and Chicana feminist thought as exemplary articulations of border thinking, and from ethnographic research at a high school in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands to offer three pedagogical practices with the potential to cultivate border thinking and foster student agency toward social transformation.