The Miseducation of Bi/Multilingual Teachers in the Midwest: Toward a Preparación Palenquera

Following the tradition of fugitivity inherited from our Black and Indigenous foreparents in Latinoamérica, this paper examines the emergent preparación palenquera that we, as part of a group of Latinx bi/multilingual educators, developed as in-the-flesh theorists through a series of capacitaciones aimed at miseducating bilingual teachers. Preparación palenquera is a fugitive space from the Eurocentric epistemic violence of teacher preparation programs and professional development in K-12 schools to (re)imagine alternative (embodied) pedagogies that center community connection, medicine, activism, and arts in the Midwest. We weave storytelling through a dialogic spiral to co-theorize our experiences during a multi-year multilingual summer school project serving Latinx children. We contrasted preparación palenquera in the project with our experience as K-16 bi/multilingual teachers. The centrality of movement, drumming, and traditional medicine gave us limitless curricular authorship and strengthened the connection between ancestral knowledge and the contemporary issues explored during the summer school project.