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Paralysis and Outrage: Channeling Emotions and Strategizing Through Play Among Bilingual Teacher-Advocates in the Making

Sun, April 11, 2:30 to 4:00pm EDT (2:30 to 4:00pm EDT), SIG Sessions, SIG-Arts and Inquiry in the Visual and Performing Arts in Education Business Meeting

Abstract

This paper examines the process of reaction, sense-making, and action through Forum Theater of a group of 20 Latinx bilingual preservice teachers exploring issues of racism, linguicism, and discrimination. Forum Theater provided a space where the messiness of emotions became a springboard for creativity, strategy-planning, and advocacy. In this critical ethnography, I stretch the notion of praxis (Freire, 1970) to connect it to kinesis (Madison, 2011) to focus on how the process of becoming is enacted through the actual doing during struggles and conflict. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain (2003) examine these processes of becoming through spaces of authoring through improvisations to understand how individuals respond and make sense of the social world dialogically.
As pre-service teachers, opportunities to recognize and redress daily microagressions in in the classroom and schools are scarce. Spaces for improvising future scenarios to learn to “play the game” (Urrieta, 2009) and rehearse (Boal, 2000) “transas, movidas, y jugadas” (strategic and clandestine practices to play the system; Urrieta, 2009) are needed for future teachers to 1) examine how certain discourses of power permeate daily social interactions in a concrete way, 2) rehearse stances and create strategies when tackling daily microaggressions at schools, and 3) develop emerging identities as teacher activists. Therefore, awakening critical consciousness needs to go hand in hand with opportunities to nurture activist identities while engaging in improvisations of an activist agency, thus mobilizing the conceptual process (poiesis) and the procedural process (kinesis) in this endeavor.
Findings show participants going through stages of paralysis and outrage, which, after a dialogic process, resulted in the creation of strategies and rules to “play the game” during improvisations. Forum Theater afforded the participants the opportunity to become teacher advocates on the stage and experiment in the flesh how it feels like to take a stand in scenarios that may occur in their future schools. The initial reactions to narratives of seasoned bilingual teachers were emotional as they discovered issues pertaining to bilingual education in the United States and its racial, xenophobic, classist, and linguicist roots were both historical (through the textbook/articles used in class) and current (through the narratives). Paralysis and outrage were emotions the participants dealt with during the improvisations. As they realized the professional context of the narratives, participants understood they needed to move away from reactionary and oppositional attitudes towards the antagonist(s) of the narratives. The participants took control of the emotions that prevented them from being assertive, showing poise, and opening dialogue. This harnessing of emotions resulted in them becoming strategic when trying to reach goals that required them to “play the game” (Urrieta, 2009). This control allowed them to enrich the performances and provided a space to explore the complexities of their roles as bilingual teachers while imagining themselves as advocates.

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