Teacher education programs have the obligation to prepare bilingual teachers, new and established, to challenge pervasive deficit and racist ideologies, to cultivate students’ identities/knowledges, and to thwart oppressive ideologies through counter-hegemonic discourses. This paper presents a case study of El Instituto, one Hispanic Serving Institution’s immersive professional development program for Spanish-speaking bilingual teachers in Los Angeles County. Conducted entirely in Spanish, the program aimed to center teachers’ sociocultural realities and community cultural wealth while honoring their linguistic capital, deepening their Spanish-language knowledge, and developing critical consciousness. Findings suggest that utilizing a sociocultural approach to simultaneously study Spanish language and critical pedagogy while centering teachers’ community cultural wealth led to deep insights about intersections of languages and culture within larger power structures that cultivate systemic oppression. However, epistemological shifts about fostering more humanizing and critical professional development for bilingual educators are necessary to achieve these goals.
At the heart of this article are the stories of a woman who identifies herself as a “homegrown,” Mexican American teacher. It is through storytelling with this teacher, Ms. Luna Martinez, that we come to understand how race, class, gender, ethnicity, and motherhood cross borders from the home to the classroom and back again. Although this article focuses on the life story of one teacher, it should be noted that her story resides within a larger research context. Ms. Luna Martinez’s story works to counter deficit, majoritarian narratives that inflict harm on Communities of Color. Moreover, her story radiates moments of survival and resilience with the potential to uplift and inspire Communities of Color. As a “homegrown” teacher who embodies a “pedagogies of the home” approach in the classroom, Ms. Luna Martinez connects with students through a familial and communal kinship.
To address the benefits of cultural intuition on qualitative inquiry, we highlight four qualitative studies and examine how we, as Chicana scholars, embrace the role cultural intuition plays in our individual studies. In this article, we illustrate how cultural intuition informs our use of Freirean generative themes within our methodological approach. For an in-depth illustration, we each highlight one of the four tenets of cultural intuition and explain how that tenet advises our methodological tools - such as family photographs as archive, student-generated photographs, teacher-generated artifacts, and community archival sources - to create Freirean generative themes with our participants and highlight the wealth present in Communities of Color.
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