Abigail Bautista '22

Negotiating Ideology, Self, and Classroom Instruction of Texts

Although educators of color are faced with the unique challenges of negotiating their identities and their professional obligations, there is an absence of teachers of color’s perspectives within the discourse of Curriculum Studies and K-12 education at large. In mediating these tensions, this thesis provides an autoethnographic account of an aspiring Filipino-American high school English Language Arts (ELA) educator’s process in developing a critical, practical framework for incorporating texts that allows instruction to uphold the promises liberatory pedagogies in the context a high school ELA classroom. The development of a critical framework underscores the importance of examining layers of intersecting histories: the teacher’s positionality, the material context of the classroom, and the discourses of the implemented texts. The practical application of this framework and the findings within this project provides insight in the ideological orientations that inform curriculum design and practical considerations that allow educators to meet the academic and socio-emotional needs of the students.