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THERE IS A DOMINANT NARRATIVE THAT HOLDS, "You may not be both Black and bilingual."... We, as African-ancestry, bilingual, multi-ethnic teachers, are saying, "Yes, you can look like this, and speak this many languages." . . . Our presence, our existence, negates the common belief that it cannot be so. (Myriam)
In this article, four bilingual educators of African ancestry discuss issues of language and culture identity construction that affect us as teachers and affect our students as ethnolinguistic minority children.' We begin by introducing each author. We then describe our methodology, identifying analytic themes present in our discussions. We follow by briefly reviewing pertinent literature and providing excerpts from our conversations. We conclude by highlighting salient aspects of our discussion.
The four authors participating in this dialogue have taught in elementary and middle school classrooms in a large urban, ethnolinguistically diverse school district in California. Norman, a Black American man in his 40s, taught upper-elementary Spanish-English bilingual classrooms for 7 years and an English language development (ELD)2 classroom for 1 year. He is currently the vice principal at his elementary school site. John, a 40 year old multiracial American man, has taught at his current middle school for 10 years, most recently in an eighth grade ELD language arts/social studies classroom. Carla, a Black Panamanian woman in her 30s, has taught upper-elementary Spanish-English bilingual classrooms for 5 years. Myriam, a Caribbean-background woman in her 30s, taught upperelementary Spanish-English bilingual classrooms for 4 years, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in education.
As a professor in our elementary education, bilingual-emphasis credential program, Lois Meyer (guest editor of this issue) recognized that our life histories and reflections as Spanish-English bilingual, African-background teachers were unlike those of other preservice teachers. She invited us to document our insights, noting that, although the four of us had never dialogued about the role of ethnolinguistic factors in classroom instruction, we expressed similar concerns that could be attributed in part to our experiences as Black bilinguals. In the summer of 1999, the four of us met and audiorecorded two, 2-hour conversations. The transcript served as the primary data source for this article.
Using interpretive methodologies (e.g., Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995), we looked for theoretically significant threads in the transcript. We...