Carrying our Roots/llevar a nuestras raíces

Abstract

This qualitative study presents examples of information about and analysis of stories of children and the early childhood teacher education students working with them. The data from the stories problematize the neocolonial roots of our conceptions of children and families, particularly institutional systems, pedagogies, assessments, and daily life realities. This current study considers evolving theoretical stances to early childhood work with children and families based upon a third space that combines aspects of the Global South and the Global North. Participants are student teachers in an early childhood teacher education program and the children they work with in Southern California. Many are bi-national and their histories and current lived experiences are reflective in many ways of communities around the world where intergenerational participants of two or more cultures and language groups with different economic and political histories find themselves learning together. Many participants, both children and adult student teachers, are living and studying in the Global North and yet, they bring with them generations of family history, knowledge, linguistic perspectives, and lived experiences from the Global South. Findings suggest that through stories there is ongoing problematizing of the neocolonial roots of our conceptions of children and families and the resulting learning experiences accessible to them. The work led us to matters of concern, Latour who urges “an understanding of common worlds as worlds in the process of ‘progressive composition’.” In other words, this research illustrates a focus on relations as generative encounters with others and shared events that have mutually transformative effects.

I carry my roots with me all the time/Rolled up I use them as my pillow/

mis raíces las cargo siempre conmigo enrolladas me sirven del almohada

(Alarcón, 2005: 3)

The late poet Francisco X. Alarcón explains the experiences of multinational, multilingual learners through his poetry. He was born in Los Angeles, California, and he considered himself “bi-national.” His entire life, he spent time in both Mexico and the United States with extended family, friends, and colleagues. Songs and stories he heard from his grandmother, as well as experiences he had growing up, inspired his poetry. He highlighted this important aspect of his life in his poem, “Carrying our Roots/llevar a nuestras raíces,” “I carry my roots with me all the time/Rolled up I use them as my pillow” (Alarcón, 2005). He always writes and presents his poetry in both Spanish and English. This approach to learning, life, loved ones, and strife is reflected in participant contributions to this research.

This qualitative study presents examples of information about and analysis of stories of children and the early childhood teacher education students working with them. The data from the stories problematize the neocolonial roots of our conceptions of children and families and the resulting learning experiences for them (Halloway, 2014; Hérnandez-Ávila and Anzaldúa, 2010; Latour, 2004; Nelson, 2009; Quintero and Rummel, 2014; Sacramento, 2015). These conceptions of children and families particularly influence the institutional systems, the pedagogies, the assessments, and daily life realities affecting learners who are immigrants and those who are currently migrating through uncertain global landscapes.

The stories in this study include family history and current lived experience, with a mixture of fact and legend, and the data are enriched by the very nature of who our participants are, where they live and work, and the number of migrant families represented. Many of the participants in the work described here, children and adult student teachers, are living and studying in the Global North and they bring with them generations of family history, knowledge, linguistic perspectives, and lived experiences from the Global South. Many participants are Latina and Latino, and some are indigenous people from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. The disruptions of thinking about early education for young children brought us to question many conceptual, philosophical, and pedagogical issues that have arisen in our research here in the Global North with research collaborators bringing much to the endeavor from the Global South. Their specific family histories in multilingual contexts, multigenerational knowledges, critical conceptualizations of place, and matters of concern (Latour, 2004) were born, in part, from their experiences in the Global South. Breidlid (2013) articulates “the domination of Western epistemology has had a major impact on the identity construction of the Other,” and “the people in the South have been marginalized and subalternized due to the imposition of Western epistemology” (p. 1). This current study considers evolving theoretical stances to early childhood work with children and families based upon a third space that combines aspects of the Global South and the Global North.

Contexts/Global South/Global North/world migration and our participants

Contexts are crucial to explaining our research participants, their family histories, and the situations of place where we work in southern California. Our participants are student teachers in an early childhood teacher education program at a state university and the children they work with in Southern California. Many are bi-national (Quintero, 2015), and their histories and current lived experiences are reflective in many ways of communities around the world where intergenerational participants of two or more cultures and language groups with different economic and political histories find themselves learning together. Many of the participants in the work described here, children and adult student teachers, are living and studying in the Global North and yet, they bring with them generations of family history, knowledge, linguistic perspectives, and lived experiences from the Global South. Again, to foreshadow, our preliminary findings suggest that through stories there is ongoing problematizing of the neocolonial roots of our conceptions of children and families and the resulting learning experiences accessible to them.

To elaborate more on the participants, the study has documented groups of teacher education students in an early childhood studies program who are student teaching with children (aged 4–8 years) in county preschools and primary schools (Pre-K to Grade 3). More than half of the adult student teachers participating in this study are first generation college students with a large percentage of them from families and communities of migrant farmworkers in California (Quintero, 2015). These participants have truly lived biculturally with many loved ones located in Mexico and Central America. Many of the children in the early care and education programs in our county are from Mexico and Central America, and many are Mixtec, an indigenous group from Oaxaca, Mexico. Mixtec children come to school speaking their home language of Mixteco, they are learning Spanish as a second language in the community, and then they are required to learn English as a third language when they come to school. These participants truly carry their roots with them at all times. And, in fact, we now know (Park and McHugh, 2014) that one in four children in the United States live in a family of immigrants. We have learned collectively through participants’ engagements in and interpretations of their stories.

Those of us working here with our “roots rolled up” as a pillow each night (Alarcon, 2005) consider “reconceptualizing work with renewed understandings of place, as grounded and relational, and as providing roots for politics that are deeply specific to place, and yet deeply connected to other places” (Tuck and McKenzie, 2015: 29). Tuck and McKenzie (2015) urge a discussion about settler colonialism, “Thus, when we theorize settler colonialism, we must attend to it as both an ongoing and incomplete project, with internal contradictions, cracks, and fissures through which Indigenous life and knowledge have persisted and thrived despite settlement” (p. 61). Southern California and many places in the United States and around the world, illustrate vast layers of both exploitation colonialism and settler colonialism with many complicated historical (documented and not documented) antecedents (Hinkinson, 2012).

Theoretical perspectives

The grounding of our research was reconceptualizations of postmodern and narrative theoretical influences (Freire, 1985; Gruenewald, 2003; Josselson, 2006; Parnell, 2012; Parnell and Iorio, 2016; Quintero, 2015; Steinberg, 2011). A focus has been on the use of stories among children and adult student teachers, individually and collaboratively. As the stories have been shared and new stories created, they have generated theoretical questions about the confluence of frameworks of study and work regarding the collaborations of children and adults. The early childhood teacher education students collaborated with peers and children, as they all studied, designed, implemented, and assessed integrated curricula. Our ongoing analysis reveals findings that support the past research about the importance of story, and have given new insights to the deep level at which stories address children’s strengths and needs (Quintero, 2015).

The participation and data collection methods of this research has included participant observation in classrooms and field notes, transcriptions of informal interviews with children and families, teacher journals, student teacher research journals, and artifacts of learners’ work samples (from both the teacher education students and the children) during their interactions, their play, curriculum negotiations, and collaboration on learning stories (assessments) of children and adults as professionals. Through narrative inquiry, the data have been analyzed by categories of information that emerge, particularly as they related to the influences of the story in various forms on learning and meaning-making with the foci of critical theory (Freire, 1985): (1) participation, (2) multiple sources of knowledge, and (3) transformative action.

In terms of connecting ongoing research to ongoing pedagogy, by our focus on storying, the children and their student teachers have led the research documenting integrated curriculum that reflects the experiences of young children in the context of their communities. There is historical richness through various layers of the personal and collective stories that have emerged. Participants have collaborated on family focused activities for school and home using folk tales, historical legends, indigenous languages from their communities, and art projects throughout the communities.

The thinking about research contexts within the Global South and Global North border crossing and our lived experiences, always carrying our roots, led us to revisit Gloria Anzaldúa (1999), one of our long-standing muses for our work:

To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras

be a crossroads. (p. 195)

This idea of living without borders and being a crossroad brought us to Taylor and Giugni (2012) who have rethought fundamental assumptions about early childhood work and guided us to consider Common Worlds. They highlight,

As adults and children, we live in a world that is increasingly characterised by mobility and displacement, coexistence with difference … More than ever before, the question of living together has become a most pressing and confronting political and ethical question. (p. 109)

This study led us to Latour (2004: 222) who urges “… rather than foreclosing upon what might constitute the commonalities of the ‘common world’, an understanding of common worlds as worlds in the process of ‘progressive composition’.” In other words, this research illustrates a focus on relations as generative encounters with others and shared events that have mutually transformative effects.

The student teachers and the children they work with in California do not want their learning or their education detached from themselves. To reiterate, many student teacher participants in our study are first generation college students from families of migrant farmworkers. Many children in the county are from families of farmworkers with 44% of households reporting language use in the home as “other than English” (Ventura County Office of Education, 2015). In addition, given the life experiences of carrying our roots, participating teacher education students, and the refugee crisis that has unfolded worldwide over the past few years, it is not surprising that in our ongoing research and study, we constantly make connections with the families and children in dangerous migration situations. As we approach our work daily in programs that serve children and families, we feel concern for the children and families in refugee camps (and worse situations). We ask the question, “What happens tomorrow?” (the day after relocation) as do many policy advocates around the world (Papademetriou, 2015). The question, of course, is often asked as we work with migrant students in California and, thus, the discussion circles back in synergistic ways.

Evolving theoretical considerations

Throughout the analysis of findings in all categories, there have been vivid illustrations of family history, critical perspectives of Place, and conocimiento theory (Anzaldúa, 2002), culture, language, and disruption of child development theory (Nelson, 2009) that we had been concurrently studying in university coursework. Nelson’s (2009) research has originated in the Global North; however, it provides alternatives to traditional developmental theory that focuses on presumed innate abilities and the assumptions of child and adult forms of cognition and static stages of development. Her framework offers an account of social, cognitive, and linguistic development in the first 5 years of life. She argues that children be seen as members of a community of minds, striving not only to make sense but also to share meanings with others. Nelson (2009), who describes herself as a contextual functionalist, researches meaning-making and memory in children. She stresses that children are “… components of an integrated system …” (p. 186), and she maintains, “… stories bear directly on the problems of different minds, different selves, and different times that are central to the child’s emerging understanding of the world …” (p. 172). At the same time, this individual meaning-making is integrated into the contextual world of people, places, and events in the child’s life. The theory supports our participants and many families around the world, in transition from the Global South who proudly carry their roots to a variety of contexts in the Global North. The contextual world of people, places, and events are sometimes a complicated mix of struggle, fear, and pain along with being close with loved ones, new friends, and sometimes places to play.

This social understanding between the self and others identified by Nelson suggests a third space for education and human interactions and connects directly to the theoretical stance of Gloria Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa’s Conocimiento Theory is described as “… an overarching theory of consciousness … all dimensions of life, both inner—mental, emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual, bodily realms—and outer—social, political, lived experiences …” (Hérnandez-Ávila and Anzaldúa, 2010: 177). Both Nelson’s (2009) approach and Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento relate to personal history, meaning-making within the contexts of self, family history, and lived experience. The ongoing storying and re-storying in our findings illustrate this.

For example, through the dynamic cycles of student teachers and children interacting and sharing stories about interests, friends, and passions, it became clear that both the young children and the student teachers were dedicated to creating, documenting, and playfully collaborating on stories throughout this research. In the study, stories of fact and imagination have been shared. Telling stories and giving and receiving stories have been forms of intergenerational engagement and examples of generative collaboration. This has catapulted us to a new trajectory in our research. These webs of influence have led us consider matters of concern (Latour, 2004) and to the necessary synergy of place and pedagogy that must be considered in the day-to-day engagements and experiences in lives of children and adults in their worlds of living and learning.

Building on intergenerational stories and deeper analysis

Our findings have generated a new theoretical journey that has pointed to the depth, breadth, and frequency of story as a complex framework for many aspects of curriculum, meaning-making, and learning. The day-to-day stories of children and their student teachers show that a framework of story—personal stories, imaginary stories, historical stories, and other types of story—has promise as a way for adults and children to collaborate on teaching, learning, and on research. Through this framework of intergenerational story, we found participants who are living in the Global North and were, of course, influenced by located study, forms of knowledge, policy, and politics, which are heavily influenced by Eurocentric modernity (Grosfoguel, 2008). Yet, we have seen vivid examples of influence coming from the Global South through family histories, multiple sources of knowledge (Freire, 1985), and examples of transformative actions that reflected the work of Latina/o artists whose work we had studied for years (Anzaldúa, 2002; Hérnandez-Ávila and Anzaldúa, 2010; Romo, 2005). These knowledges continually appear in our complex findings in the teacher education students’ and children’s stories. Therefore, we have generated new research questions that have laid the groundwork for ongoing qualitative study that led to more disruptions and reinterpretations.

For example, we now ask questions that include and relate to the following:

• In what ways do children and their student teachers—across generations and roles—create, build upon, and reinvent each other’s stories to make new meanings through consideration of family history, multigenerational knowledges, and experiences with critical conceptions of place as place relates to matters of concern?

• In what ways do the children’s and teacher education students’ stories offer new possibilities that connect Global South theoretical work in the Global North contexts with pedagogical practice, framed by story and based upon family history, critical place influences, and multilingual contexts?

These research questions have uncovered deeper findings. The findings are leading us on new theoretical journeys. The idea of “carrying our roots” from one world to another creates a third space where the “roots” become a metaphorical “pillow” to enlighten us throughout our lives. Some examples are highlighted through the following excerpts of findings that are categorized according to themes that arose again and again.

Family history and multigenerational lived experience

Nelson (2009) insists that meaning-making and memory in children reveal that children are not developing in an individual way in a predicted sequential journey, but that children are components of an integrated system. She maintains, “stories bear directly on the problems of different minds, different selves, and different times that are central to the child’s emerging understanding of the world …” (p. 172). Nelson (2009) says,

Meaning is in the mind and the brain; it is also in the body that recognizes familiar things and places. Meaning comes to reside in the child, but it also resides in the social world, in the affect-laden interactions with caretakers and others, in the symbols and artifacts of the culture, in the language spoken around the child. (p. 10)

The adult student teacher participants are faced with challenging “ages and stages” views of individual development often promoted by the profession. We see that children bring their own meanings to share with others, especially children, and in the context of the shared meanings memories are made. Sometimes the stories of the children and the stories of children and teachers become the “third space” that is a special communalized combination of Global North and Global South influences.

And, Kuhl (2013) approaches her research of young children’s (from all over the world) acquisition of language by explaining that her “… current working hypothesis is that language learning depends on the social brain. Infants learn not only because they are computational wizards, but also because they are social beings, with a strong drive to communicate from other social beings” (p. 1). She goes on to explain that “My goal is to see in the brain the interaction between brain areas … that are phylogenetically (based on natural evolutionary relationships, Merriam-Webster, 2017) more modern and enable social understanding” (p. 1).

These data are drawn from research studies initiated in the Global North; however, both researchers have taken their work worldwide to participants from many cultures and contexts. They consider meaning, language, and culture as integral parts of the research process. Furthermore, it could be considered that researchers, participants, and educators are being encouraged by this work to be inclusive of multiple sources of knowledge, multiple languages, and various approaches to transformative action.

In fact, a third reinvented research space is being created as marginalized people and children share stories of their lived experiences. An example of a teacher education student addressing this “third space” (a combination of Global South intentionality and Global North components) comes from Fátima, ¹ a Latina from East Los Angeles and an early childhood teacher education student. In her research journal, she explained her work with learners from the Mixtec community in a variety of settings from infant/toddler programs to tutoring support programs in middle school and high school. Fátima is well-aware and appreciative that both the Spanish language of her ancestors in Mexico and the English of her school, state, and country were both honored in her family home and community. And, she wrote in this journal entry that she immediately was sensitive to 4-year-olds struggling with learning a third language:

Working with migrant students, ages three to eighteen from the Mixtec community, has been an experience unlike any other. When I was focusing solely on the younger ages in a preschool program, I was witness to children struggling to identify a language to speak. The English of some of their teachers was the third language they’d been introduced to—after Mixteco and Spanish. What is going to happen to the children when they enter the elementary years and are expected to read a language that no one in their home speaks?

She acknowledged, “I am the oldest in my family (so I could help my siblings) but here I wonder who do these kids go to for help? How are parents supposed to be involved parents if this language barrier stops them” (Muñoz, 2013).

In a university class focusing on methods for supporting multilingual learners, Fátima wrote a “ Where I am From” poem (guidelines from Christensen, 2000) that reflects family history and lived experience in her own life that informed her understanding of Mixtec youth:

Where I am From …

I say I am from a breeze

From a golden globe that warms my every step

From a place where mountains decorate my surroundings

With their white tops on hot summer days

From a place where dreams are supposed to come true

With white picket fences

From a place where people run on their own clock

Places to be and people to see

From a place where gold started it all

And diamonds are a girl’s best friend

From a place where stars decorate the floor we walk on

And the stars in the sky hide behind our bright lights

But this is all a lie …

She poetically juxtaposes her Global North life in California (the white fence and the stars decorating the sidewalks in Hollywood) with her deeply personal family memories that reflect her Global South roots as follows:

Where I am really from is from a place full of spirit

And culture is everything

From “Donde esta Fátima?”

And “Todo el mundo es un coro …”

From a place where family is priority

And priority means leaving them behind to better their life

Like my father …

So now I can say I am from a breeze …

(Muñoz, 2013)

A different segment from this student teacher’s research journal (Muñoz, 2013) documented a conversation between herself and a high school student that she was also working with from the Mixtec community. The excerpt further pushes the understanding of family circumstances and contexts leading to matters of concern, across generations, and across roles of interaction. She wrote,

A tenth grader approached me asking about my own living situations. “Maestra, usted vive sola?” she said. I went on to say I had a roommate, then I had to explain what a roommate was, and that yes, I take care of my personal things.

She asked if I missed my family, but specifically she asked if I missed my mother, at the moment this wasn’t awkward; later I made the connection. A while later that day she shared with me that she had lived in Mexico while her mother lived and worked in California. This high school student had to go to school, work, and maintain a home for her eight younger siblings. Three years ago her mother brought her here to California, and here she is. She is a straight “A” student speaking English very well, soaking in academic information, and was well on her way to college and to being a success story.

But … now, she is being taken out of my program. Worse than that, she is being taken out of school as a whole. Her mother is moving her to Las Vegas with no plans to enroll her in school … (Muñoz, 2013)

Muñoz’s final thoughts about migrant students show the meeting of Global South and North emphases through the complexities of family values meeting traditional education in the Global North. Muñoz wrote,

Reading articles about some things like teaching methodology makes us knowledgeable; it is important to learn what others have found and concluded. But nothing beats personally working with these kids and first hand verifying that what one is reading in academia is true. (Muñoz, 2013)

Critical conceptions of place

Tuck and McKenzie (2015) elaborate on decolonizing conceptualizations of place, in part, to “Interface spatial theories, methodologies, and methods with Indigenous theories, methodologies, and methods. The challenge is to formulate a description of the theoretical foundations of critical place inquiry that are accountable to Indigenous peoples and futurity” (p. 29). Many scholars worry that our work in the Global North seldom highlights aspects of theories, philosophies, and practices that have been long ingrained in childrearing, daily life, and scholarship from the Global South. Our entangling this in light of Anzaldúa’s theory of consciousness that includes all dimensions of life, both inner—mental, emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual, bodily realms—and outer—social, political, lived experiences (Hérnandez-Ávila and Anzaldúa, 2010)—led us to study theoretical work that relates to critical ideas about place and practice and other Global South perspectives. As previously mentioned, we have learned that these theoretical perspectives are relational worlds and they are pedagogical worlds (Taylor and Giugni, 2012).

A student teacher, Lea, had been working for a few months in an elementary school with 8-year-olds and was pushed to think of theory in terms of critical ideas of place as it relates to all dimensions of life, especially as it all relates to the 8-year-olds she saw in the classroom of her student teaching. The elementary school served many of the most economically challenged families in the city with a large population of children from the migrant Mixtec community. The student teacher was somewhat jolted by her own initial impressions of the children. She is a bilingual (Spanish/English) woman whose family was originally from Mexico and has lived in California for several generations. She reflected,

I looked back on my notes from day one and reflected on how much I have learned from all students in these past weeks. I realized that I had written on the first day that some children lack energy and motivation to participate and engage in classroom activities and learning. I have realized now that this is due to the fact that most children do not get the sleep they need through the night or have any peace and quiet at home. Some of them share a home with other families, and this plays a role in how they function at school.

I realized that I had been so fast to judge them in the beginning and now I empathize with them. I found out just last week that one of the students is currently homeless and his family sleeps in their car. (Reyes, 2016)

Critical conceptions of Place in terms of lived experiences, family dynamics, situations with a child living in two households, and school contexts arose also for Eva, another student teacher in our project who was preparing a felt storyboard in a kindergarten classroom in a different school. She noted that one student, Nina, came in with a perplexed look on her face as she saw that the felt storyboard was being prepared. Nina chose a spot in the front row and sat there with a curious look on her face. As Eva began to tell the children who hurried over to watch her that she had two little mice friends that were hiding behind two of the multicolored houses, Nina exclaimed, “I know this game! We used to play it at my old school.” Eva then explained the rules to the “game” and the group of children listened intently. (The game involved different colored felt houses placed on the felt board and two mice figures that were hidden behind two of the houses. A song about colors often introduces the game, and then children are encouraged to guess which houses the mice are behind. An illustrated storybook follows and includes a story about why the mouse was hiding.)

Nina smiled as she sang the accompanying song with the other children and shot her hand in the air to guess what color house the mouse was behind. When it was her turn to guess, she chose purple and grinned broadly when she saw that one mouse was behind it.

Eva then brought out the book Mouse Paint (Walsh, 1995) and Nina blurted out, “I love this book! I have it at Mommy’s house.” When Eva finished reading the storybook, she led a discussion comparing and contrasting the storybook with the felt board game. Nina scrunched up her nose and shook her head when a boy said that the “Little Mouse” game was not a story. Eva asked Nina if she disagreed and she nodded yes, and remarked, “It (the game) shows us how the two little mice are hiding behind two houses and we found out one was in the purple house and one was in the brown house. It has a beginning, something happens, and then there is an end.” Other children nodded their heads in agreement that it is a story and Nina smiled.

The example here documents a complex incident that evolved as Eva, the student teacher, learned more about the family situation of the child, Nina, and how this situation is one that entangles Place in terms of a child living in two different family homes with an unpredictable pattern and lack of routine (between her mother’s home and her father’s home). This was complicated by her transferring to a new school. In the 3 months since school had begun during family focused activities and storybooks in the class, Nina had never mentioned any family members—this was the first time. And in this story activity Nina showed interest and confidence interacting with her peers (which hadn’t happened earlier in the 6 weeks since school had begun). The school social worker had mentioned to the kindergarten teacher and the student teacher that the child’s family life “is complicated.” Eva reported that Nina often seemed disengaged in school, but the story of the mice and the fact that she enthusiastically shared how she loved reading the story at her mother’s house was poignant (Goldstein, 2015).

Place, in the case of the student teacher, Lea mentioned early, working with 8-year-olds in an elementary school is framed by many of the economic manifestations of migrating families, the difficulty of life for children as parents and family members struggle to survive. In the case of the kindergarten child and her student teacher and classroom teachers, the critical conception of Place related to the complexity of her relationships with two parents living in different households. She had never mentioned her mother during the first 6 weeks of school until this storybook activity with Eva, her student teacher.

Art, conocimiento theory, culture, language

In conocimiento Theory, Anzaldúa highlights transformative elements of her theories of mestizo consciousness and la facultad (mental ability). “Like mestizo consciousness, conomcimiento represents a non binary, connectionist mode of thinking; like la facultad, conocimiento often unfolds within oppressive and entails a deepening of perception” (Keating, 2009: 320). Durham (2012), a scholar of Anzaldúa’s work, maintains, “Anzaldúa’s epistemological project requires active participation on many fronts” (p. 183). The student teacher, Lea, mentioned previously, who works with 8-year-olds at an elementary school with many Mixtec families and children, illustrated complex analysis of her engagements with the children using all the dimensions of life, including conceptual, social, emotional, spiritual, and academic. She wrote,

During my time at the elementary school, I have observed that it is a low-income school. I have observed that many students in the classroom can barely speak English and write simple sentences (in any language), which is unfortunate to see. I have observed that the school’s principle imagines particular goals for students and the teachers to meet, but the teachers set different ones. In other words, not everyone is on the same page.

I think that overall what is important is that the students see this school as a second home, a place where many find comfort, love, and their basic needs met. Due to financial circumstances the many children don’t have their basic needs met; many don’t have basic food or clothing.

In the beginning of my days in the classroom I asked my cooperating teacher, Mrs. Reza, what the philosophy of the school is. She said, “that every child should be college ready by the end of their years at this school.” Her own philosophy is different. She said her philosophy is “Believing that if she tries her best at teaching then her students will try their best at achieving.” And I can see that while she lacks some academic preparation, she truly cares about her students. I can see this by the way students from her previous classes come into her class and run up to her in the halls. I think that is the type of teacher I want to be—a teacher everyone remembers because of the caring she gave them. She did more than just teaching them the required knowledge, she actually cared. (Reyes, 2016)

Language issues are a constant dynamic in educational settings in southern California (Quintero, 2009, 2015). Sadly, for decades, there often has been outdated thinking from a deficit perspective and a belief that all learning must be done in English, no matter what home languages children speak. A student teacher, Ida, working in a large inner city school in a neighborhood with economic barriers, linguistic diversity, and rich family histories, wrote about how her pedagogy supported home language, family history, and the whole of conocimiento theory:

In my small group (in a kindergarten classroom) I wanted to focus on family story, and bookmaking. I started out by sharing that my mother had come to California two months before I was born, and that many of my cousins still live in Mexico. I hoped to get to know the students better and thought maybe they would share their stories if I shared mine. When I asked if anyone had family members that lived or currently live in a different location from our city, one student shared with me that her father is in Mexico. I thought this was interesting because this child refuses to speak Spanish at times and seems to be ashamed of her Spanish language.

And there were two other students who are not very outspoken and did not share as much about their family. But to make sure they wouldn’t feel left out, I made sure that everyone got a turn to talk about family. I did this by asking them each a few specific questions in Spanish individually. And I did see that they became more engaged when I asked the questions in Spanish. I finally did get a response from one of these students who shared with me that her grandparents lived in Mexico. That sounds like a small thing but I had been working with these students for 6 weeks and this was the first time this girl had mentioned her own family. (Santos, 2015)

The emphasis on caring by the third grade teacher in a school that is consistently pressured to focus on reading scores (in English) is an example of Anzaldúa’s “la faculidad.” Similarly, the student teacher who combined using Spanish (in a class that was not designated a dual language class) with her students and the sharing of her family history of relatives living in Mexico reflects both the shared space of the Global North context of a school classroom in the United States, but Global South roots of language and family history creating an intergenerational connection among children and family members of both students and the student teacher.

Disruption of child development theory

Nelson (2009), as discussed earlier, researches alternatives to traditional assumptions of child cognition and static stages of development. She argues that children be seen as members of a community of minds, striving not only to make sense but also to share meanings with others. Another of the student teachers wrote in her research journal about initial informal unstructured interview conversations with children from a preschool class located in the Mixtec community.

She was wondering about what the children might be interested in focusing on for experiences. She was concerned because many of the staff had mentioned that because the Mixtec children came from poor families and were now tasked with learning both Spanish and English as their second and third languages, that they were “behind” developmentally. The student teacher, Leila, wrote,

If I made a book of the observations I took during this month I would title it Inquisitive Minds. I was amazed at the things I found! I saw ladybug hunting, finding leaks in hoses, following photo directions, inquiries about print. I was amazed at the variety of interests that varied day-by-day, and week-by-week. What I noticed was that children were deeply involved in their learning and were creating meaning through their work. I think the key to creating activities that are relevant to the children is to include the children in creating experiences so they can channel and focus on what they need and want to learn from that particular experience. (Callaway-Cole, in Quintero, 2015: 137)

Another student teacher participant told us the story of Fernando, highlighting issues of traditional child development, home language, pedagogy, and imagination. He was in a state-funded preschool in Southern California. While a large percentage of the children are Spanish-speaking and just learning English for the first time, the school did not promote support of home language except in emergencies or when speaking with parents. The student teacher working with Fernando, Pam, herself a bilingual California native was in a sensitive position of trying to almost subversively support the 4-year-old’s use of his home language. She wrote a lengthy journal report about Fernando, the situation, and his potential. The vignette is repeated here as it points to a child who is developing in complex ways in spite of the misconceptions of many of his teachers. She wrote,

I am assigned to sit with 4-year-old Fernando who is unable to sit still on the rug during literacy time. Since he is unable to control his behavior, and sit quietly crossing his legs (that all children are requested to do) Fernando is told to sit in a chair. Fernando shows interest in my notebook as soon as he notices I am writing notes. He wants to write his name. I said, “Fernando, you may write your name as soon as we go out and play. Let’s listen to Teacher right now.”

“Yo escribo mi nombre?” (I write my name?), he asks me in Spanish. “Si, despues que salgamos a jugar afuera” (Yes, after we go to play outside), I answer him back in Spanish. “Ok, Teacher. Gracias.” He turns to listen to his other teacher.

As soon as we are outside during playtime, Fernando runs up to me, “Teacher Pam, yo hago homework” (Teacher Pam, I do homework). “You do your homework?” I ask. “No! Tu homework!” (No, your homework!). He wants to do my homework? I give him my notepad, unsure what he means. He begins writing. He writes, then looks up, looks around, then writes some more.

Pam then reflected on what she has learned about the child and his learning context, and about herself as a professional:

My new friend, Fernando, cannot manage to sit still with his peers, but he’d been observing me and noticed I take notes. It seems that our friendship and what he’s noticed me doing (writing) have become important to him, and he can communicate it all with me in his home language. I don’t see the “developmental delays” his teachers have mentioned. (Mata, 2013)

Fernando’s developmental assessment under a Global North epistemology is in contradiction with Nelson’s theory and the student’s interaction with the child and her analyses. In other words, when a social relationship develops—with an adult who speaks his home language with him—and the child keenly observes his new friend involved in an activity that is important to her (taking notes), he shows focused interest and potential.

There are many stories from other participants that relate to research on language acquisition specifically and child development more broadly. Another student teacher, Anna, wrote about children in her kindergarten classroom:

My student teaching classroom is dual language, so some large group circle times are led in Spanish. When speaking of the days of the week, a girl whose home language is not Spanish responded when asked what day of the week it was. This may not seem like a big deal. However, I feel that there are many meanings to be taken from this. It shows that she understood what the teacher was asking and she was able to come up with the vocabulary in Spanish. This relates to Kuhl’s (2013) research because she believes that learning another language is determined by social interactions. This child does not speak Spanish at home and yet she is able to learn it at school. The dual language activity encouraged children to learn and engage in both languages.

We have stories, too, about continuously controversial topics in language use such as code-switching. A student teacher, Lu, working with 4-year-olds wrote,

At the site I am student teaching at currently there is a young boy named Jaime. Jaime is a dual language learner. It is very interesting for me to hear Jaime speak because he combines his Spanish with his English. Even though I don’t speak Spanish, I am still able to understand what Jaime is saying. This relates to the California Preschool Foundations because Jaime is building his language development through the use of vocabulary, sounds, phonemes, etc. (in both languages, even though the CA Learning Foundations don’t say this!) This also relates to Kuhl’s (2013) research because she has shown that there are many advantages for young children who hear multiple languages at an early age. Jaime is learning both Spanish and English, which I think will be very beneficial for his future.    (Kim, 2016)

Imagination, stories, and common worlds

Latour (2004) speaks about common worlds as ethical worlds that attend to “the common good” … insisting that a common worlds ethics requires us to remain radically open to the composition of these worlds (Taylor and Giugni, 2012: 110). As explained earlier, our work in southern California had long valued the dynamics of story—personal stories, imaginary stories, historical stories, and other types of story—that always combined a mosaic of meaning that children were constructing from their lived experiences and from fantasy. Murris (2016) presents a pedagogy that disrupts a “structural and systemic discrimination of children, particularly as knowers …” (p. 35). She proposes education practices in which “… all earth dwellers are mutually entangled and always becoming, always intra-acting with everything else … Individuals materialize and come into being through relationships; and so does meaning” (Murris, 2016: xi). Children with imaginative expertise are experts at intra-acting.

Young children often combine fantasy, reality, people, and other-than-humans in their meaning-making. A teacher education student working with 4-year-olds wrote,

This week at the preschool I was able to observe an example of a collaborative story between the teacher and the students. It was during snack time when the children were all sitting at a table together eating. The teacher started by saying, “Let’s make up a story! I’ll start!” She then said, “Once upon a time there was a spooky story …” Eduardo continued by saying, “About ninja turtles and skeletons.” Another child, Sophia, said, “The ninja turtles are good.” The teacher then said, “And they ate …” Eduardo went on to say, “Milk and pizza!” Another child named Callie added, “And then the skeleton saw cats and dogs.” Sophia said, “And they got attacked and then Maleficent came and was looking for treasure.” The teacher added, “Maleficent has power and says, ‘abra ca dabra!’.” Eduardo finished the story by saying, “Maleficent stole the cats and dog’s gold on an island.”

I thought this story was interesting to observe because the teacher was able to work together with different children in creating a spooky story. I remember in class we studied Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s (1986) work with Maori children found that children were fascinated with and interested in stories that are scary. The children seemed to have really enjoyed it as they created all the different things they thought of, such as ninja turtles and Maleficent. (Mena, 2016)

Another student teacher, Jess, described also the intentional encouragement of engagement with plants and the natural environment:

The children at my preschool classroom love to take initiative and explore their surroundings. On their campus they have a trail that winds through the land around them and their own garden area. Throughout my time here I have noticed just how much these children take pride in their garden and their hiking trails. I hear children discussing how to water their plants, “don’t water the lemon tree too much or it won’t grow.” I listen to the children talk to their parents about their garden, “today we planted potatoes and Brussels sprouts and one day we will have a salad that we can eat from our garden.” Lately the killdeer have been laying eggs and making nests within their trails and the children have taken it upon themselves to care for them. Kelsey expressed her concern about the nests safety and stated, “I think we should put rocks around the nest—to keep the mommy and babies safe.” The freedom that these children have allows them to express themselves and experience curriculum in a way that is authentic and related toward their specific interests. (Hunt, 2016: np)

Matters of concern

The deeper analysis of our study led to considering new theoretical stances to early childhood work with children and families in their current contexts of living with the intentional consideration of family history, multigenerational knowledges, and experiences with critical conceptions of place as place relates to matters of concern (Latour, 2004). Latour (2004) urges researchers to consider a multiplicity of realities, or “worlds” for each actor’s agency and inspiration for action. Documenting this action involves a strong dedication to relativism. The relativist “takes seriously what [actors] are obstinately saying” and “follows the direction indicated by their fingers when they designate what ‘makes them act’” (p. 232).

The teacher education student, working in the Grade 3 in the school mentioned previously, wrote in a reflection about an important conversation that combined a small part of her story of daily routine with a big part of an 8-year-old’s realty:

Today, I was sitting down with one of my students, who I will call David. As I sat next to him I began to ask him how their cake, they baked as a class the previous day, had tasted. He responded, “It was good.” Then he asked me, “Why did you have to leave early yesterday?” I explained to him that I needed to take my car to the repair shop in order for it to be ready by the time I had my class in the evening. Surprised, asked me, “You go to college?” I said, “Yes I do.”

I began to discuss with him what a day in college consisted of and how I had to sometimes spend more time at the library in order to get my homework done. He told me about the times he went to the library. I began to ask him if he enjoyed his time reading at the library. Sadly, he opened up to me with emotional stories about going with his older brother, but due to the fact that his older brother was involved with drugs and currently was in jail, he didn’t go to the library any more. It broke my heart. I said to him that I hoped he would see his brother soon and that I was sure he missed David as much as David missed him.

He looked at me with a different look; I think this was a way of appreciating having someone listen to him. I think children sometimes tell stories in order for their thoughts to be heard, a cry for help. It made me realize that teachers need to think outside the box during any type of story sharing because while they can be funny and interesting they can also be a way for children to learn from by how teachers respond. (Reyes, 2016)

Lea still reflects on the intertwined realities of her students—already at age 8 years.

Conclusion and implications

This work aims to disrupt deficit notions of children and families, especially including multilingual learners with rich histories and traditions from the Global South. We propose the existence of a “third space” where Global South influences connect to theoretical work with pedagogical practice (in both Global North, South and all around the world) that is framed by story and based upon family history, critical place influences, and multilingual contexts. Those of us working in the Global North for decades have addressed “diversity studies,” “teaching tolerance,” and “celebrating diversity.” These many attempts at advocacy for learners who have traveled to our schools from their lives in the Global South have often been less than effective. The paradigms for considering worldviews and childrearing practices and theories from the Global South bring new possibilities to our work. Repositioning Global North standpoints and creating a dialogue between Global South and Global North onto-epistemologies is another possible way to approach our work. In any approach, we advocate for participants giving us inspiration to problematize dominant understandings of childhoods and the world as a way to continue to trouble colonial perspectives (Viruru, 2005).

Our work in southern California with participants with “roots rolled up as our pillows” connects to broader work with world migration. Our research participants strongly believe that children and families, when supported, share stories to learn from and with each other. In other words, participatory learning is multi-dimensional, and learners and teachers sometimes reverse roles.

We have seen that stories are ways to document, learn from, and generate understanding in multilingual contexts in diverse, even crisis, situations. Through the pedagogy of story-making and story-sharing among children and their teachers, a framework of story emerged as a way for adults and children to collaborate on learning, meaning-making, and learning. Here, in the dynamic context of early childhood programs, children and their adult student teachers taking the research lead is a useful frame for thinking about, supporting, and documenting the intergenerational, multi-layered learning. The continuing work that supports connection among theory, knowledges, intentions, and histories of the Global South and the Global North illustrates relationality of our work to the children in the refugee crisis. To repeat, we learned from Latour (2004) that “rather than foreclosing upon what might constitute the commonalities of the ‘common world’,” we should be “understanding common worlds as worlds in the process of ‘progressive composition’” (p. 222). In other words, this research illustrates a focus on relations as generative encounters with others or shared events that have mutually transformative effects.

An artistic example of other work that connects the worlds and explores this third space is the work of poet, activist Terry Tempest Williams. She is an activist and writer who is nourished by art to “create beauty out of brokenness.” A dear friend, currently working with Nigerian refugee women in Italy, is reading Williams’ (2008) book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, as our participants in this study are. She says, “For sure if one doesn’t try to find beauty also in the broken world, the world would become a place too difficult to be in” (Orlandini, 2017, Personal communication, Verona, Italy). The stories of participants from all over the world contain pain and struggle, and beauty in a broken world.