Teaching and Knowing inNepantla: “I wanted them to realize that, thatisbeing bilingual.”

Abstract

Bilingual teachers’ professional identity inquiry may open up possibilities for agency and equality in U.S. dual language contexts. Deploying Borderland, Agency, and Position theories, this article narrates the life histories of three nepantlera Chicanx/Latinx dual language bilingual teachers—Jessica, Roberto, and Marta—who work in different English-Spanish dual language immersion (DLI) schools in a Midwestern city. Jessica self-identified as Chicana and the other two participants as Latinos. The purpose of the study was to examine the complexity of these teachers’ professional identity development and their possibilities for agency within nepantla—their negotiating of their linguistic and cultural identities as English- or Spanish-only teachers in a dual language program with a strict language separation model. Data included three life history interviews with each participant over four months. Findings suggest possibilities for teachers’ assertion of their silenced bilingual voices, for reclaiming their linguistic and cultural identities, and for further developing their “bilingual pedagogical noticing,” as well as conscious leveraging of their aesthetic and deeply personal understanding of themselves—of nepantla—to assert more holistic bilingual and bicultural identities in DLI programs. Through sociopolitical consciousness and the leveraging of educators’ and students’ identities, the context for teaching and learning can be (re)imagined to allow for (re)presenting teachers’ fuller, holistic professional identities and for opening up potential spaces for agency.

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