A community sin vergüenza: Considerations when designing classroom spaces for bi/multilingual students to speak, listen, and be heard

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the parallels experienced when pre-service teachers and those teaching multilingual students in elementary school design classroom spaces around the Right of the Learner to speak, listen, and be heard. We share examples of democratic commitments and shifts in our own understandings of the role of the teacher and professor. We also discuss the importance of being willing to be with students as they shed the shame that may have kept them silent in other classroom settings. This article explores what it means for educators to make room for multilingual students to use their voices and embrace their ideas sin vergüenza, without shame. Melissa, assistant professor of mathematics education: During my years as a bilingual elementary teacher, I conceptualized my work as a form of community organizing. What that meant, at the time, was the need to address the way so many of my students had been silenced at school and made to feel that knowledge and solutions to problems came from authority figures (Adams, 2018). As a mathematics teacher educator at a predominantly Latinx 1 1 There are numerous and ever-shifting labels to refer to the community that we refer to as Latinx. Our community has been named, defined, and racialized in a variety of confounding ways to serve the needs, expectations, and desires of power structures within the U.S (Grappo, 2022). Latinx as a term adapts the gendered pan-ethnic identifiers Latino and Latina to allow for one gender-inclusive term. There are those who advocate for using Latine, which is similarly gender-neutral, but potentially easier to say in Spanish. We do not think that Spanish (a colonial language like English) is need of our help. Further, we have seen many arguments for the beauty and the power of the x and believe that the roots of the term Latinx within Queer Latinx communities online, speaks to the power that comes in renaming our communities and making space for all of us to speak, listen, and be heard (see Guerrero, 2022.) Here we use Latinx to describe the broader community and refer to ourselves as Latinas because we are both women. university, I have, once again, been exploring what organizing work looks like when preparing multilingual Latinx teachers. Community organizing work requires deep listening and collaboration among all group members — everyone’s voice matters, and it is through listening to one another that we define and consider approaches for navigating collectively-identified problems. Ashley, undergraduate teacher candidate: The work of a teacher is not just giving students information to prepare them for their next state test. My experience as a student has taught me that it is also about giving your students the support they need. Now, as I am learning from my studies, I am also learning to bring up my experiences from my time in school. Reflecting has taught me that I hope to be a supportive teacher, one that students can come to, one that students do not feel pressure from any time they come to my class. My work now is on how to accommodate myself to the type of environment I want to create in my classroom.