Educating Across Borders

The Case of a Dual Language Program on the U.S.-Mexico Border

By María Teresa de la Piedra, Blanca Araujo, and Alberto Esquinca; Foreword by Concha Delgado Gaitan

The University of Arizona Press

Educating Across Borders is an ethnography of the learning experiences of transfronterizxs, border-crossing students who live on the U.S.-Mexico border, their lives spanning two countries and two languages. Authors María Teresa de la Piedra, Blanca Araujo, and Alberto Esquinca examine language practices and funds of knowledge these students use as learning resources to navigate through their binational, dual language school experiences.

The authors, who themselves live and work on the border, question artificially created cultural and linguistic borders. To explore this issue, they employed participant-observation, focus groups, and individual interviews with teachers, administrators, and staff members to construct rich understandings of the experiences of transfronterizx students. These ethnographic accounts of their daily lives counter entrenched deficit perspectives about transnational learners.

Drawing on border theory, immigration and border studies, funds of knowledge, and multimodal literacies, Educating Across Borders is a critical contribution toward the formation of a theory of physical and metaphorical border crossings that ethnic minoritized students in U.S. schools must make as they traverse the educational system.

Educating Across Borders constitutes a unique contribution to the literature on dual language schools, both for its qualitative rigor and for the border context that it depicts.’—Kim Potowski, editor of The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language

‘A tour de force in the ethnographic study of transfronterizx students in the United States.’—Cristian Aquino-Sterling, School of Teacher Education, San Diego State University

María Teresa de la Piedra is an associate professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research centers on language and literacy practices in bilingual communities on the U.S.-Mexico border and in Latin America.

Blanca Araujo is an associate professor and director of the Office of Teacher Candidate Preparation at New Mexico State University. Her most recent book is Multicultural Education: A Renewed Paradigm of Transformation and Call to Action.

Alberto Esquinca is an associate professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas at El Paso. His research centers on the bilingual and biliterate practices and identities of Latinxs, particularly in STEM contexts.

Foreword by Concha Delgado Gaitan
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Theoretical Frameworks to Understand the Transfronterizx Experience
2. Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning in Dual Language Settings
3. Conducting Research on the U.S.-Mexico Border
4. Stories of Transfronterizx Experience
5. Language and Literacies Crossing Borders
6. Making Connections: Recontextualizing for Academic Writing
7. Translanguaging: Access to Science Discourse
8. Multimodality as a Resource for the Social Organization of Learning
9. Understanding, Valuing, and Modeling Transfronterizx Funds of Knowledge
Conclusion: Transfronterizx Practices as Generative Spaces

Appendix: Methods
References
Index