Negotiating Entangled Contradictions about Being Well Educated: Nudos (Knots) in the Lives of Bilingual Latina Teachers

Abstract

There is a need to better understand the experiences and perspectives of bilingual Latina teachers in U.S. schools. One way to gain a deeper understanding of bilingual Latina teachers is to examine their perspectives and experiences around being a well-educated person. A greater understanding of how teachers negotiate being well educated is important for considering tensions with conflicting values and worldviews around cultural constructs that shape role expectations, views of education, and social interactions. To build on existing studies and further theorize teacher identity-in-context, this qualitative study examines how bilingual Puerto Rican teachers conceptualize and enact notions of being a well-educated person. I utilized a combined interpretive framework (critical biculturalism, chicana/feminism, borderland theory) to analyze participants' personal, professional, and community knowledge. Like a braid, I viewed these three categories as separate, yet interwoven strands of identity. By including these three strands, my aim was to better understand the experiences and perspectives of teachers around a focus area that potentially challenges dominant views of being well educated. Findings demonstrate how participants affirm bilingual-bicultural stances and cultivate respectful resistance amidst multiple roles and changing contexts. More specifically, participants negotiate entangled contradictions around being bien educada and being well educated in their roles as daughters, wives, mothers, and teachers. Implications and recommendations for research and practice are discussed. Keywords: ser bien educada/being well educated, Chicana/Latina feminism, critical biculturalism, Latina teacher identities, qualitative research NEGOTIATING ENTANGLED CONTRADICTIONS 3 Negotiating Entangled Contradictions about Being Well Educated: Nudos (Knots) in the Lives of Bilingual Latina Teachers There is a need to better understand the experiences and perspectives of bilingual Latina teachers in U.S. schools (Ochoa, 2007; Quiocho & Rios, 2000). Yet, Varghese and colleagues (2005) remind us that "in order to understand teachers, we need to have a clearer sense of who they are: the professional, cultural, political, and individual identities which they claim or which are assigned to them" (p.22). One way to gain a deeper understanding of bilingual Latina teachers is to examine their perspectives and experiences around cultural constructs such as what it means to be a well-educated person (