ABSTRACT
Chapters 3 opens up the case study of Dominican students taking linked Spanish and English academic literacy courses within a learning community at Bronx Community College (CUNY). After reviewing studies of systemic barriers to college success focused on Latin@ and Dominican students, this chapter discusses the implementation of a mother tongue–based culturally responsive intervention aimed at mitigating the dire impact of those barriers. It explains how a learning community program was used to sneak in the mother tongue through the back door and circumvent potential resistance against bilingual education. Finally, the chapter discusses the authors’ role as the English instructor and as a second language learner/participant observer in the Spanish course. This role led to an ethnographic partnership between the teacher and his students, a bidirectional learning process, an enhanced translanguaging methodology, and a shift from coercive to collaborative power relations.
