ABSTRACT
In 1994, Brewer Elementary School was on the cusp of a promising new direction. The same year, one of us (Gutstein) began working with the teachers and the principal, Mr. Rodríguez, who had just been chosen by the Local School Council as the school’s first Mexican American principal. Rodríguez had a vision for the school as a vital community educational and cultural center. In his first few years at Brewer, he pursued this goal boldly and tenaciously. He was intent on remolding the anti-Spanish and deficit assumptions of some of the staff and creating a school that upheld bilingualism and biculturalism. One of his opening salvos was to hang a large banner in the school proclaiming, Es Bonito Ser Bilingue” and its English translation, “It’s beautiful to be bilingual.” Although the school’s bilingual program was transitional to English, under Mr. Rodríguez’s principalship, Spanish achieved equal status as a public language. Public announcements were made in Spanish and English, administrators conversed with each other openly in Spanish, and Spanish reverberated in the halls and cafeteria. Rodríguez also had an educational vision of student-centered, multi cultural teaching and a curriculum that emphasized problem solving, multiple perspectives, and
construction of knowledge. He encouraged student leadership and involvement in the community. Rodríguez had been a bilingual education teacher and community activist, and in the first few years he also supported and recruited teachers whose educational goals were explicitly political and critical. A central task for him was to nurture greater initiative, collaboration, dialogue, and shared learning among teachers. In the first month at his new job, Mr. Rodríguez organized a faculty retreat over three weekends to forge collectively a new vision for the school.
