Feeling Saudade: Transborder Brazilian children’s critical consciousness in liminal zones of dual language bilingual education classrooms

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reports on a multi-year ethnographic study that explored how transborder children with ties to Brazil and the U.S. embodied and further (co-)developed critical consciousness in K-3 two-way dual language bilingual education (DLBE) classrooms. Leveraging a decolonial transborder approach in the analysis of classroom observation data, this article foregrounds how the children contested marginalized social identities related to unauthorized immigration status and co-constructed subalternized knowledge under the teacher’s radar in spatio-temporal liminal zones of sanctioned classroom discourse. Such contestation, embedded in accounts of saudade, or nostalgic longing, as well as transnational im/mobility, mapped onto critical consciousness components. This study calls on bilingual education scholars to attune to elementary-aged children’s knowledges, subjectivities, and actions on various scales as essential to understand and further support their critical consciousness formation.