At a public, land grant university in the United States, we are revising our language teacher education curriculum to align with Community-Engaged, Anti-Racist (CEAR) Pedagogy. Our framework is guided by scholarship by España and Herrera (2020), Muhammad (2020), and Garcia, Johnson and Seltzer (2017), among others. We share our CEAR principles and practices, our curriculum planning and piloting process, and the participatory action research project that grew from and with these efforts. We focus on our CEAR Inquiry Community and how faculty, public school educators, and community-based organization leaders planned, introduced, and collaborated on brainstorming inquiry questions, designing the study, creating interview protocols, collecting data, analyzing, and disseminating findings. We share how we are working to create a horizontal, collaborative inquiry space (Paris and Winn, 2018) and the challenges and rewards of conducting inquiry in this space.
We begin describing the CEAR public school curriculum development project which prompted interest in launching an inquiry group. As we prepared to work on curricula, we engaged in powerful professional development which supported creating norms, beliefs, principles, and practices that guided our curriculum development efforts. As we entered the inquiry space, we considered adjusting these guiding frameworks and tools for conducting inquiry. We share these frameworks and tools.
As a group, we consider what inquiry questions should guide our investigation, and together we designed and reflected upon our interview protocols. We piloted our interviews, reflecting on the interview tool, the experience of interviewing, and of being interviewed. We specifically focused on how our process broke (or unintentionally perpetuated) "doing research" from a traditional framework, and we worked to consider how to align our practices and actions with our principles.
We report our findings of the diverse experiences shared by Inquiry Community members. Through a narrative inquiry approach (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), we analyze the ways our experiences and the stories we tell create counter narratives and offer new ways of engaging in the work of empowering teachers, K-12 students, community members, and faculty for anti-racist pedagogy and action. We found that our approach was sensitive to our teams' context and experiences: for example, all stages of motherhood, workloads, COVID contingencies, and ongoing racial violence. The stories shared moments of hope and ways to act gained from involvement in the project. We tell the story of how we attempted to change traditional research practices to enter uncharted spaces, share counter narratives, and collaboratively create an inquiry path as a community-engaged, anti-racist Inquiry Community.
References
Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass.
España, C., & Herrera, L. Y. (2020). En comunidad: Lessons for centering the voices and experiences of bilingual Latinx students. Heinemann.
García, O., Johnson, S. & Seltzer, K. (2017). The Translanguaging classroom. Leveraging student bilingualism for learning. Philadelphia: Caslon.
Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic Incorporated.
Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (2018). Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. SAGE Publications, Inc.
