Feeling their way towards justice: The embodied emotional journeys of critically conscious bilingual teachers

Abstract

Elementary bilingual education programs in the U.S. today are troubled by many racial and linguistic inequities (Snyder, 2020). In order to navigate these complex program environments and make choices in their daily teaching, novice teachers must develop a critical awareness of power and its manifestation in classroom environments. Recent research has suggested that this awareness, or critical consciousness should be a central aspect of teaching and learning in all bilingual programs (Palmer et al., 2019). Currently, the field of education knows little about how such a consciousness develops, how it is manifested or how it is connected to everyday classroom experiences. My dissertation study utilized a critical ethnographic approach (Madison, 2005) to engage novice dual language teachers in a collaborative exploration of the daily experience of critical consciousness. I engaged in participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collective critical reflection group meetings to gather qualitative evidence of teachers’ embodied critical consciousness and its impacts in their practice. Findings indicate that critical consciousness enabled novice teachers to interpret, navigate and respond to systemic inequities in their new teaching environments. Furthermore, the teachers’ formulated a collective critical consciousness underpinning a shared culture of subversive teaching. These findings point to strong connections between critical consciousness, identity, emotion and social justice oriented pedagogies. The study also illuminates the potential of shared critique to foster transformative approaches to bilingual education.