“Yeah, Things are Rough in Mexico. Remember We Talked About Hard Times?” Process Drama and a Teachers Role in Critically Engaging Students to Dialogue About Social Inequities in a Dual Language Classroom

The majority of dual language education programs in the U.S. context include children coming together with the long-term goal of becoming bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate (Christian, D., 1994; Howard, Sugarman, Christian, 2003). It is urgent that practitioners and scholars who see the value of the TWDL model continue to explore methods that address social inequities that arise in highly contested contexts such as an urban public school classroom. Drawing from a critical consciousness (Freire, 1998) framework and discourse analysis methods this paper explores how one dual language teacher critically engaged students to dialogue about undocumented immigration through the implementation of process drama. Findings indicate that students will engage about social inequities when teachers facilitate discussions by pushing students for further inquiry, to provide contextual information, giving students a voice, or affirming their responses. The urgency to raise critical consciousness in two-way bilingual education contexts also emerged as these dual language programs continue to be gentrified across the nation (Palmer, Cervantes-Soon, Dorner, & Heiman, 2019; Valdes, 1997; Valdez, Freire, Galavan, 2016).