Challenges for Latino Educators Crossing Symbolic, Cultural, and Linguistic Boundaries: Coming to Voice in Teacher Preparation with Competing Voices

Abstract

This article reports on a teacher education program's preparation of bilingual paraeducators during a period of conflicting educational reform of structured English immersion in Massachusetts. Drawing on nexus analysis of discourses (R. Scollon & S. W. Scollon, 2004), we discuss factors faced by Latino educators. These include competing discourses, historical institutional inequities, and boundaries circumscribing the interactions between university and communities. Through the use of a participant's text as a re-semiotized means of representing the new potentials that bilingual paraeducators bring to the field of teacher education, “cultural bumps” emerge and directions for teacher education are presented.