I began my journey in education as a social studies teacher at Colegio Terranova, a Spanish-English bilingual school in Quito, Ecuador. For a few years I taught middle school social studies and high school history as part of the IB curriculum.
I then began my graduate studies in 2017 at the University of Oregon, in the Critical & Sociocultural Studies in Education doctoral program. In this program, my research interests and activities have revolved around issues of social justice in multilingual and intercultural education, multilingual teacher education and professional development, and exploring Translanguaging pedagogy as a more equitable approach to multilingual learning.
Why do I care about multilingual education?
At my school, half of the classes were taught in Spanish, and the other half in English – and History was always taught in English. The idea was that core content classes, like History, should also support language development, and English proficiency was highly valued. My colleagues and I clearly understood that language development was a top priority, and we were expected to firmly maintain the language borders of each classroom. However, the English-only rules that were expected of my classroom did not always make sense to me. For example, in a unit on the Cold War in Latin America, it made no sense not to use original sources, texts, or videos in Spanish, especially when everyone in the classroom could understand them. To enforce the English-only rules in this context would have felt contradictory to the common sense of teaching. It also felt unnatural and irrelevant to focus my attention on enforcing the rules over classroom discussions, making it difficult to generate discussions that are meaningful, collaborative, and critically thoughtful. The borders that were created by the language rules of the school not only felt artificial, but clearly did not reflect the ways my students commonly broke those language rules – prioritizing flexibility and creativity more than conformity.
These experiences remain significant to me because they created challenges that pushed me to question why these kinds of artificial language borders felt opposed to not only my instincts as a teacher, but also to the multilingual instincts of my students. These experiences continue to shape my identity, interests, and agendas as both a teacher and researcher. As I continue to explore the ways we plan and enact bilingual education, I have come to realize that the sometimes nonsensical language rules of my old school are very much the normal ways of planning and teaching language in bilingual education in the United States. I repeatedly catch myself recalling the dilemmas, difficulties, and confusions that language borders caused for me as a teacher – and asking myself two key questions: Why do we “do” bilingual education this way? Is there a way to do it that better reflects the multilingual instincts of teachers and students?