Accompaniment for the climb: Becoming reparational language educators of Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jenna R. Cushing-Leubner IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Martha Bigelow, Advisor December 2017 © Jenna R. Cushing-Leubner 2017 Acknowledgements When I think of all the people beyond myself who are the reason that this work is what it is, I am quickly overwhelmed by the number of people I am surrounded and supported by. It is truly a lesson in gratitude and awe. The youth of Eleanor High School, particularly the brilliant, insightful, loving, persistent, and courageous people of Jóvenes con Derechos. You have shared your desires, dreams, and struggles to have the schools you deserve with Toni and with me. ¡Adelante! The Hayward Collective for opening (with) me when I would have preferred to stay closed. Mary (Fong) Hermes, Alissa Case, Erin Dyke, Erin Stutelberg, Angela Coffee, Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, Shannon Dahmes, and Colleen Clements: you always seem to be what I need. My second week in the program, I was invited by Jehanne Beaton to join a collective of practitioner-scholar-researchers. TERI research collective, you were a trial by fire and a place of belonging and challenge from the beginning. Thank you in particular to the MNEds dispositions squad for being instrumental in honing my own desires and refusals: Jessica Tobin, Miranda Schornack, Su Jung Kim. Martha Bigelow, my advisor, who introduced me to participatory and community- based research, opened up so many opportunities to me, and always asks “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” My committee members, Kendall King, Mary (Fong) Hermes, Misty Sato, and Julio Cammarota. Kendall, you showed me my first pathway for being a woman in academia. Fong, you showed me how to remember i myself in academia. Misty, you showed me how to create spaces where academia doesn’t see them. Julio, you showed me how to have a conscience doing what can otherwise become unconscionable work. Timothy Lensmire, on multiple occasions you let me breathe and feel good about my working-class Wisconsin roots, and you reminded me to care first for love and then for research. ‘Toni’ and ‘David,’ you brought joy, wisdom, possibility, and friendship I never imagined. You showed me research, scholarship, and anti-oppressive teaching is the work because it is both hard and good – and that it is only possible with one another. The first cohort of Spanish ‘heritage’ teachers who welcomed me into their classrooms and homes. Thank you for trusting this stranger. My SLE colleagues and the Bigelow Block: Kate Stemper, Yi-Ju Lai, Hanna Ennser-Kananen (I wouldn’t have applied had it not been for you), Beth Dillard, Mary Lynn Montgomery, Cari Maguire, Kathleen Mitchell, and Maria Schwedhelm. My academic sisters and writing partners Mel Engman and Jen Vanek. Thank you for your clarity, compassion, and critique. My first family and the family who have chosen me: Joan Cushing, Chris Leubner, Saryn (Cushing-Leubner) Volden, Aimee (Cushing-Leubner) Rasmussen, George Dalbo, Connie and Bob Dalbo, Larry and Lanna Laird. Thank you for raising me, raising me up, and being endlessly patient and loving. You see me in ways I will always aspire to become. George, thank you for laughing, thinking, and exploring with me. ii Mom, I learned to envision something more beautiful than currently surrounds us and then to surround ourselves with that instead. Dad, I learned to distrust “that’s the way things are” and, with one another, make the things we deserve instead. iii Dedication For Toni and for all of our jóvenes con derechos – those who have come before and those who are coming. iv Abstract ‘Heritage’ language classes (e.g., native speaker or native language literacy classes) are often taught by already licensed world language teachers. Only a handful of U.S. teacher preparation programs offer explicit and extensive preparation for teaching ‘heritage’ languages (National Heritage Language Research Center, 2017). ‘Heritage’ language pedagogies (Fairclough & Beaudrie, 2014) and teacher preparation (Caballero, 2014; Potowski & Carreira, 2004) are underdeveloped and undertheorized. This dissertation considers what is possible when a teacher learns to teach Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language by attending to raciolinguistic ideologies and raced-language schooling policies/practices, generational knowledge of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, and lineages of collective struggle. This is informative for both the preparation/support of ‘heritage’- language specific teachers and for conceptualizing of critical and humanizing pedagogies that center the desires and possibilities of ‘heritage’ language learners. This dissertation emerges from the participatory design of one multiyear ‘heritage’ language program at a Midwestern city public high school that took shape around reparational aims for educational justice. It draws on five years of participatory research designs and the use of paired collective memory work. Participatory research connected multilingual and multiply racialized youth of Américas descent (self-named as Jóvenes con Derechos), their black multilingual non-Latina Spanish as a heritage language teacher (Toni), and a white multilingual non-Latina teacher educator (Jenna) as co-researchers and co-designers. Over five years, Jóvenes con Derechos youth, Toni, and Jenna engaged in multiple overlapping and interacting participatory action research and design projects that shaped the development of a reparational stance towards ‘heritage’ language education, curriculum, and pedagogical approaches. Youth-led participatory action research projects connected youth with existing movements for social change led by members of their own communities and in solidarity with other communities of color and Indigenous communities in their state and beyond. Using participatory design research components of historicity, instructional thinging, curricular infrastructuring, and role re-mediations, this study offers methodological and conceptual theorizing of participatory and humanizing research and pedagogies. I argue for the need of “methodological arts of the contact zone” and suggest as examples the framework of “interlapping participatory research projects” and collective memory work. This work also outlines an argument for conceptualizing ‘heritage’ language education as reparational in its desires and designs. The methodological framework of interlapping participatory research, accompanied with paired collective memory work, is then used to make visible the processes of becoming reparational language educators through a memory work montage of instructional thinging and necessary role re-mediations over time. Final implications consider what is required of teacher preparation institutions to engage in the formation of critical pedagogues who take a reparational stance to language education that understands multilingual youth of color as co-designers of their educational experience in schools. v Table of Contents List of Tables vii List of Figures vii Prologue 1 Chapter One: Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language – A call for reparational language education in U.S. schools 27 Chapter Two: Interlapping participatory projects – On methodological arts of the contact zone Chapter Three: The historicity of Jóvenes con Derechos – Excavating roots of heritage study with Latinx youth in U.S. schools 51 Chapter Four Interlude: Agonistic thinging 149 Chapter Four: “Maybe it’s our job to teach” – A fight-back ethnographic look at instructional thinging 161 Chapter Five Interlude: Infrastructuring 198 Chapter Five: “A platform to speak back from” – Collective memory of curricular infrastructuring 209 Chapter Six Interlude: Role re-mediation 237 Chapter Six: “This isn’t who I thought I’d be” – Roles, myths and re-mediations 245 Chapter Seven: Another mountain – Surveying the terrain coming terrain 266 Appendix A: Memory word data tracings 291 Appendix B: Mis raíces indígenas (Spanish-English text and screenshots) 293 References 300 vi List of Tables Table 2.1: Code tree for secondary analysis vii List of Figures Figure 2.1: Top-view model of interlapping participatory projects Figure 2.2: Side-view model of interlapping participatory projects Figure 2.3: Project map of interlapping participatory projects Figure 2.4: Interactive research questions Figure 2.5: Collective memory map portion Figure 2.6: Echocardiogram segment from data source 15.06.21 Figure 4.1: Project map of interlapping participatory projects Figure 4.2: Snapshot of instructional thinging – Jóvenes con Derechos’ YPAR projects Figure 4.3: Youth’s declaration of linguistic rights Figure 4.4: Bilingual invitations to JcD’s linguistic rights summit Figure 4.5: Sample commitment forms Figure 4.6: Bilingual invitations to curriculum expo Figure 4.7: Mis raíces indigenas opening shot Figure 5.1: Project map of interlapping participatory projects Figure 5.2: Curricular infrastructuring of Jóvenes con Derechos viii Prologue1 “I honestly don’t know where to go with this one. At some point, it’s too many factors, you know? At some point, it’s no, your Spanish isn’t up to it, but that’s not the real issue. I think I’m frustrated because she’s supposed to be better, you know? It’s like you said, she can talk the talk, she’s walking the walk, she shows up to things and sounds like she wants to do this. But, then, when it comes down to it, she just can’t let go. She needs to control the space. She needs to control them. And she’s giving up on everything she says she wants to define herself with as a teacher to hold on to that.” I’m pacing in short circles in my living room. Nodding and mm-hmm, mm- hmming, saying “yeah – yeah” while Toni lays out her frustrations on the other end of the phone. Over the past two years, she’s had a string of people in and out of her classes: teacher candidates, short term observers thinking of becoming teachers, returning students working as teaching assistants, and first year teachers wanting to observe what’s happening with her and her students.