Glocalizing Artifact, Agency and Activity An Argument for the Practical Relevance of Economic Injustice and Transformation in the Science Education of Mexican Newcomers

Abstract

Hear me? Here, me! As a multicultural teacher educator and scholar who does engaged ethnographic work with Mexican newcomer students and families, these lines of Martínez’ poem speak deeply to me. They invite me to understand anew that issues of representation, of having one’s voice heard (Hear me?), are intricately linked to issues of recognition, of being seen, not as how others would perceive one to be, but as one is. To close the gap between perception and reality, Martínez calls for a coming-closer that leads to the discovery of the real self (Here, me!). This movement from an abstracted, distant, way-of-knowing, which Martínez interrogates with his use of a question mark, towards one which is more concretized and immediate, is, as Martínez signals with his use of the exclamation point, imperative. Trying to re-present the roles and resources of Mexican newcomers so that science educators and researchers can re-cognize who these learners are and what they bring to the classroom constitutes the heart of my work. This work has involved acercándome/bringing myself closer to these students, their families, and communities, both in the US and Mexico. Whereas I would never claim to be getting to the reality or the what-is of Mexican (im)migrant experience and subjectivity, my work is responding to the invitation-to-learn that this population’s increasing presence in U.S. schools not only extends but demands.

Unlike some multicultural teacher education colleagues, I am not interested in merely identifying the learning preferences or communication styles of Mexican kids. If I take up such constructs, I do so with a radically contextualized interest in what sociohistorical configuration of influences made such preferences or styles possible cultural practices in the first place. As a critical multicultural teacher educator, I bring to my work a predisposition to see society, schools, and selves as haunted spaces where not only can we encounter “the lingering past” (Gordon 1997, p. 205) but we can also divine the hastening future. From this view, both past and future are luminous, though seemingly invisible, in the very presence of the present.