University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2012 Movements of Diverse Inquiries as Critical Teaching Practices Among Charros, Tlacuaches and Mapaches Stephen T. Sadlier University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Sadlier, Stephen T., "Movements of Diverse Inquiries as Critical Teaching Practices Among Charros, Tlacuaches and Mapaches" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 664. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/664 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MOVEMENTS OF DIVERSE INQUIRIES AS CRITICAL TEACHING PRACTICES AMONG CHARROS, TLACUACHES AND MAPACHES A Dissertation Presented by STEPHEN T. SADLIER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION September 2012 School of Education Language, Literacy, and Culture © Copyright by Stephen T. Sadlier 2012 All Rights Reserved MOVEMENTS OF DIVERSE INQUIRIES AS CRITICAL TEACHING PRACTICES AMONG CHARROS,1 TLACUACHES2 AND MAPACHES3 A Dissertation Presented By STEPHEN T. SADLIER Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________________________ Maria José Botelho, Chair _________________________________________________ Barbara Cruikshank, Member _________________________________________________ Sangeeta Kamat, Member _________________________________________________ Laura A. Valdiviezo, Member _____________________________________________ Christine McCormick, Dean, School of Education 1 Trade union members seen as disloyal to the spirit of the union and instead faithful to party politics. 2 A dark furry rodent; the informal name of a teachers’ group in this study. 3 A raccoon; a party hack who forages around at night like a rodent to fix elections. NOTE ON LANGUAGE USE I present this dissertation to a predominantly English-reading audience, and as such I made every effort to aid in reader friendliness. All my fieldwork and all but one interview I undertook in Spanish. Fieldnotes in Spanish particularly facilitated participant commentaries, and in earlier drafts of the dissertation, I kept the bilinguality of all Spanish-original data, including in-text citations. A largely English language text remains, distilled from those bilingual snippets, though I preserve the Spanish in three circumstances: when I use a term like guelaguetza, Zapotec practices of mutual aid in farming and festivities, I present it with bilingually at first mention and keep it in Spanish if it carries specific contextual weight inadequately or clumsily rendered in English; when a Spanish language phrase or concept word lends itself to alternative translations and nuances; and when I decided the Spanish felt better than the English. All of the English language quotations, save those published in English, are my translations. I understand I run the risk that language-oriented readers may feel the data watered down, and I recognize the proclivity both in ethnographic and multicultural-oriented research to present words as uttered by the participants. This latter tendency I consciously avoided. Instead, I present English-language data due to my own experience of a reader. While I recognize the weight ethnographers put on placing the reader on the footpaths of community life, oftentimes the overuse of the spoken language serves to exclude a reader unfamiliar with the context and culture. This, in turn, may render the Oaxacan teachers’ social milieu as timeless and folkloric, a position which conflicts directly with my theoretical and methodological commitments. I follow APA’s use of foreign language terms in italics upon first mention and then in ordinary script in all circumstances save when the term reappears in a later section without recent mention. To avoid interrupting reader flow, I introduce translations with a comma or with “or” for longer segments and parenthesis for single terms. Finally, I replaced all personal and proper names with pseudonyms and hid the locations and identifying features of institutions, cities and towns. Larger or unique entities like Oaxaca City or the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) I kept in the original, as they would be impossible to conceal given the thick descriptions. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A desire to problematize “critical” pedagogy drove me to enter my doctoral program in Language, Literacy and Culture in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. During this time, I found myself interacting with geography professor Julie Graham precisely on the point of seeing products and practices afresh, though our conversation focused on the political economic rather than the pedagogical. Julie recounted stories of how she had come through second wave feminist and Marxist training at the geography department at Clark University, and that when she started to venture from the dialectical materialist path into “weak theory,” she hit resistance. In recent years she had bumped into a former advisor at Clark who asked her if she was still doing her weak theory “theatre of the absurd.” With a wry smile Julie related this last encounter to me, as I knew the professor from my time as a geography undergraduate at Clark several years after Julie’s time there. These challenges to her work (and now legacy) proved edifying, for she once matter-of-factly admitted that she never heard an economic argument she could not counter on her own terms. Had Julie stayed within the mainstream parameters of her prior training and experience, rather than the “theatre of the absurd” of weak theory, I wonder if she would have been able to speak with such confidence. To rethink a set of commonsense practices, she had also said, becomes a kind of ethics, for theorizing the same practices in the same way and getting the same outcomes becomes a form of folly, and life is simply too short for that. Recalling Julie becomes a point of departure of my dissertation project in the pedagogical practices of primary teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico. And I start by dedicating this vi dissertation to Julie, to her memory, especially keeping in mind her courage, curiosity and generosity. I also wish to thank my advisor Maria José Botelho for hours-long meetings and for reading of my work which prompted in me broader imagination. I express gratitude as well as committee members Sangeeta Kamat who helped me appreciate how doctoral study involved a theoretical and personal refashioning, Barbara Cruikshank who helped me read widely and valorize exact words and ideas of generative thinkers and Laura Valdiviezo who fomented in me a taste for ethnographies as storytelling. I also could not have started without the mentorship of Alvino Fantini. I am in indebted to Lee O’Donnell for her multiple commentaries on earlier chapter drafts. I also wish to thank Marcela Romero, Nacho Morales, Maricela López, Dalia Guzmán, Flor García, Clara Meza, Adriana Bustamente, Luis Antonio Silva, Luis Octavio Silva, Marcela Romero and the San Fermín Parents’ Committee for their kind support and prodding when needed as well as los maestros Sergio, Mariluz, Lulu, Oscar, Nancy, José Luis, Pablo and Bernardo, Freddi and Sara for helping me contextualize Oaxacan education and history. I am grateful to professors Hugo Aboites, Eduardo Bautista Gustavo Esteva, and Bulmaro Vásquez Romero for taking time to meet with me and/or read respond to my theoretical notes as well as Kara Dellacioppa, María Elena García and Judy Hellman for insightful email discussions on Oaxacan politics. Also, professors Sonia Alvarez, Meg Gebhard and Barbara Madeloni have guided my course papers in ways that proved helpful here. My doctoral student colleagues, Marky Jean Pierre, Thelma Belmote, Kathy McDonough, Elsa Wiehe, Fabiola Orozco-Mendoza and Rebecca Lisi provided helpful feedback and support at different junctures. I remain indebted to Mrs. Guadeloupe vii Alcántara for her hospitality in Mexico City and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for their pre- dissertation grant that proved invaluable for my first field visit in 2010. I also want to thank Asma Kiran for her love and support, my parents Ellen and Jerry Sadlier, my sister Michelle for their stalwart support as well as my Seattle network of Catie, Connie and Claire who pulled me out of the mental labyrinth to offer needed social engagement during the months of writing. This support has been indispensable in articulating the pages I present here. The words here are mine; I assume responsibility for lapses and inaccuracies as well as moments of joy within. viii ABSTRACT MOVEMENTS OF DIVERSE INQUIRIES AS CRITICAL TEACHING PRACTICES AMONG CHARROS, TLACUACHES AND MAPACHES SEPTEMBER 2012 STEPHEN SADLIER, B.A., CLARK UNIVERSITY M.A.T, SCHOOL FOR INTERNATIONAL TRAINING Ed.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Maria José Botelho This year-long participant observation qualitative case study draws together five social practices of mid-career elementary school educators in the Mexican southeastern state of Oaxaca: