The Transformative Potential of Humanizing Pedagogy: Addressing the Diverse Needs of Chicano/Mexicano Students

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present an argument for understanding the factors that support or constrain the development of Chicana/o students' academic identities and consequently, their academic resiliency in high school. The article draws on a larger study investigating ways that schooling structures and teacher mind-sets can sustain students' ability to complete high school requirements. A subset of findings from a five-year ethnographic study in a high school in Colorado serves as the basis for a conceptual framework that honors what Chicana/o students identify as critical to their ability to succeed. Using observational data, interviews and an ethnographic perspective the article examines participating adolescents' understandings of key elements that fostered their academic resilience. These key elements are respeto (respect), confianza (mutual trust), consejos (verbal teachings) and buen ejemplos (exemplary models). Findings suggest that teachers who practice a humanizing pedagogy are instrumental in fostering healthy educational orientations among Chicana/o adolescents, which in turn results in their academic resiliency against all odds.

Should We Use a Capital Framework to Understand Culture? Applying Cultural Capital to Communities of Color

“…Like emotions, it builds dynamically within a relationship. This overlaps with what Fránquiz and Salazar (2004) call confianza. Trust is multiplied, promoting aspiration and resistance among those who feel it.…”

“…Some researchers have begun to move beyond social capital, to social capacity (Mickelson & Nkomo, 2012), social values (Goldthorpe, 2007), or conceptions of aspiration that largely circumvent theories of cultural capital (e.g., Fránquiz & Salazar, 2004). Oughton (2010) looks to the work of Hodkinson et al (2007), who successfully challenge deficit discourses without reliance on capital's vocabulary.…”

Foreign Language Education in the 21stEuropean Context: Exploring New Directions in Intercultural and Plurilingual Approaches Using Anzaldúa’s Border Epistemology

“…Though Anzaldúa´s writings have already been explored within the fields of Literature, Culture, Ethnic Studies, Linguistics, Gender Studies and Post-Colonialism (for example, Yarbro-Bejarano, 1994;Alarcón, 2002;Keating, 2005;Castillo, 2006;Cantú, 2011;Mignolo, 2012;Lobo, 2015), as well as in publications within the field of Education and Pedagogy (Fránquiz and Salazar, 2004;Fránquiz, Salazar and DeNicolo, 2004;Walsh and Townsin, 2015), they have not yet been applied to FLE, with the purpose of generating new practices to be implemented in classrooms, in order to cultivate spaces of social activism and critical citizenship, where alliances between different groups are learnt to be built halfway, as Anzaldúa claims in the preface of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987): "today we ask to be met halfway" (n. pag.…”

Caring for Students: What Teachers Have to Say

“….cursory attention (is given) to the role of an ethic of care in effective teaching" (page 22). While "helping a child struggling with a task, verbally expressing kindness and encouraging children with words and actions" [26, page 1189] are few actual classroom practices identified by research, caring teachers purposefully know their students well and establish relationships with them because students value the personal interaction [1,14,[27][28][29][30][31].…”