Latina Educators and School Discourse
Dealing with Tension on the Path to Success
Jill A. Aguilar
Laurie MacGillivray
University of Southern California
Nancy T. Walker
University of La Verne
CIERA Inquiry 3: Policy and Profession
What happens to successful Latina students' identities and relationships as they acquire language, habits, preferences, and values associated with school discourse?
There is a need to increase the diversity of the teaching pool; furthermore, Latinos who enter the teaching profession must themselves succeed in school. For this paper, we focused on the Latina teachers' memories of schooling, and found that the teachers experienced significant conflict between expectations of school success and expectations at home. There was a common idea that education was a positive goal, yet we found tensions related to how education would take place and who would receive it, as well as to where, when, and for how long it would continue.
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