Centering the Fourth Pillar in Times of TWBE Gentrification: “Spanish, Love, Content, Not in That Order”

Abstract

The growth of TWBE programs—mainly due to the surging interest of White English-speaking families—presents the field with myriad challenges and hopeful possibilities. Critical scholars in bilingual education point to an urgency to reissue Guadalupe Valdés’s “cautionary note” due to a neoliberal path targeting TWBE programs, posing a dangerous threat to the original aims of bilingual education that prioritizes the lives and realities of Latinx students. A key element in this reissuing is the urgency to move beyond TWBE’s laudable and official pillars of academic rigor, biliteracy and biculturalism, and multicultural competence to include a concerted focus on the fourth pillar around the development of critical consciousness. Through a critical ethnographic study in a rapidly gentrifying TWBE school, we documented a fifth-grade teacher’s critical pedagogy of Spanish, love, content, not in that order. We argue that her language-as-empowerment framework is a critical pedagogical extension of Ruíz’s language-as-resource framework and is crucial in the current neoliberal moment of TWBE.