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Professional Development across Borders: The Promise of U.S.-Mexico Binational Teacher Education Programs.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Sawyer, Adam |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | As the school year gave way to summer vacation, a group of 11 Nebraska educators eschewed more traditional summertime activities to embark on a 16-day professional development journey to the western Mexico city of Guadalajara. During a two week stay in Mexico, these educators--who were made up of in-service and pre-service teachers and school support personnel--engaged in a structured program of guided school visits, meetings with Mexican educators, Spanish classes, lectures on Mexican culture and immigration, and Mexican family home stays. What compelled this group of present and future educational professionals from the U.S. heartland to make this voyage to Mexico to immerse themselves in this study abroad course? As we will see, theirs was a part of an urgently-felt educational response to a dramatic demographic shift in the state. Echoing a pattern found in locales throughout the American Midwest and South--the so-called "New Latino Diaspora"--recent mass immigration has caused Nebraska's Latino population to more than quadruple between 1990 and 2010 (Hamann & Harklau, 2009; U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). As a result, educators in the state--who are almost uniformly non-Latino--have little to no experience or cultural and linguistic reference points to guide instructional efforts in meeting the educational needs of this new population that now comprises 14.3% of the state's total school enrollment (Nebraska Department of Education, 2011). Indeed, each participant in this program was currently practicing or expecting to work within this burgeoning Mexican immigrant population. The program--known as "Mexican Schools and Communities"--was coordinated as a partnership between a public university in Nebraska and a private religious university in Guadalajara, Mexico, and is an example of a little-known, but growing phenomenon of U.S.-Mexico binational teacher study abroad programs with similar objectives (Alfaro & Quezada, 2010; Hamann, 2003; Sawyer, 2006; Terrazas & Fix, 2009). This article tells the story of these program participants, their time in Mexico, and what they feel they gained from this immersion experience in relation to their work as educators in Nebraska. With a special focus on the reflections of three purposively selected teacher participants in the program, I find that each of these educators experience growth in their intercultural development as a result of program participation as demonstrated by an increased empathy for immigrant Latino parents and children; a breaking of stereotypes about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans; and an increased knowledge of the transnational lives of Mexican-origin students. Within each of these areas, these teachers utilized their previous life experiences as a lens by which to access this new knowledge and the challenging of previously-held beliefs--a finding speaking to the constructivist nature of teacher intercultural learning. I furthermore argue that these changes would likely not have been achieved without the program's study abroad component. I posit that teacher study abroad to Mexico--with certain important caveats--has the potential to be a powerful tool in developing the intercultural competence and self-efficacy necessary to enact culturally responsive pedagogies for teachers serving Mexican-origin communities. Background During the now-declining fourth great wave of immigration to the United States, immigration from Mexico stands alone in the magnitude of its contribution to the country's diverse contemporary ethnic landscape. The 11.7 million Mexican-born people living in the US represent nearly a third of the nation's foreign-born population. Overall there are 32.9 million people of Mexican-origin living in the United States, representing 64.9% of the Latino category (1) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Currently one in 10 children in U.S. primary and secondary schools--over 11.7 million persons under age 18--are of Mexican origin (Passel, 2011). … |
| Starting Page | 3 |
| Ending Page | 27 |
| Page Count | 25 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 41 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1090410.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
