Chapter 10: Building Bridges not Walls: The Potential of International Partnerships on Educational Research and Practice

This chapter explores a nascent multilayered partnership among one school district, one higher education institution’s college of education (both in Georgia, USA), and a community of educators and schools in Guanajuato, Mexico. Hall County in Georgia has a large number of Latino students— many from the Guanajuato region—and thus is seeking to support its students through the development of a bilingual seal for high school diplomas. The district upholds an additive bilingual model, emphasizing students’ native languages and cultures (Nieto & Bode, 2012). Too often, these students feel pulled between two worlds, a tension that sometimes results in students feeling marginalized in any community: They are literally and figuratively relegated to the borders (Anzaldua, 1999). To support its Spanish-speaking students, Hall County approached higher education institutions in Georgia and Guanajuato, Mexico, to develop partnerships so that teachers from Guanajuato might come to the States to study for free at the graduate level, at the same time that they could teach content in Spanish for the local PK-12 schools in return for a stipend and living expenses. Concurrently, practicing and preservice Georgia educators would study in Mexico to understand their students’ backgrounds. The district approached this exchange in the hope of emphasizing “pedagogies of the home” for its Latino students (Castillo-Montoya & Torres-Guzmân, 2012, par. 11).