ABSTRACT
Our three children (Grinberg and Goldfarb) attend public schools and are bilingual in Spanish and English. One of the coauthors of this chapter, Saavedra, is aChicana fromNewMexicowho is bilingual andbicultural and the other two coauthors are immigrant, tricultural, and multilingual. Throughout the years, they have encountered numerous situations andmisunderstandings on the part of teachers, administrators, and fellow students grounded on assumptions andmisconceptions not only about who they are as tricultural people, but also about their linguistic expressions, their diverse ways of knowing, their passionate modes of communicating and expressing their ideas, their ways of relating and connectingwith others, and even about their own frustration
with not being validated forwho they are. Therefore, we are personally invested in the education of teachers because teachers can open or close possibilities, can reinforce and exacerbate conflicts, or can bridge and integrate differences such as those that derive from assumptions and misconceptions. Teachers can shape learning experiences, make them meaningful, exciting, respectful, relevant, and inclusive, or can teach that who the students are and what they bring with them as cultural beings is of no value. Furthermore troubling, they also can teach that in order to succeed in school students must abandon who they are, their heritages, their language, their behaviors, values, cultural norms, and ways of knowing. If we have these concerns about our children and if we are not happy about some of the teachers, administrators, and board of education members, who are an important part of our children’s lives and education, then why should we accept these “educators’’ teaching other children? This chapter explores the education of educators, which not only happens in the university but also happens in the community including all of our children (our own and those members of other families and caregivers). Thus, in a Freirean sense, if the education of teachers happens in specific places such as local communities, then our children not only learn from teachers, they educate teachers, too.
