| The research project described here theorizes my own lived experience. This process is guided by the works of researchers who have made their lives a "source of inquiry" (Anzaldua 1987; Negron-Muntaner, 1994; Villenas, 1996; Behar, 1996; Richardson, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1997; Alvarez, 2001; and Delgado-Bernal, D., Elenes, C.A, Godinez, F., Villenas, S., 2006) in order for readers to hear my inner voice as I reflect about the cultural and educational world that has shaped me (Ladson-Billings, 1997). By doing this, I aim to start decolonizing my mind as I uncover issues that are relevant to members of the colonized and marginalized communities that I am part of.;The main reason why I have chosen to pursue such a project is to illustrate the ways in which English, the language that I have chosen to teach others, and which in my country has become associated with U.S. colonial power, can be appropriated and used for the empowerment of my people. By appropriating the language and making it my own, English stops being the language of the colonizer and becomes a language of liberation that can be used to resist and denounce colonial experience. Therefore, in this dissertation I use personal and professional experiences to explore Puerto Rican colonial experience and the tensions that emerge from it in order to connect my personal experience to that of Puerto Ricans as a people.;Even though English teaching in P.R has been studied from a variety of historical, critical, socio-cultural and post-colonial perspectives, a perspective that has been long overlooked is that of the Puerto Rican Spanish native speakers who teach English on the Island. This is an area that deserves to be studied because it can potentially empower those responsible for teaching English to Puerto Rican students. Studies that empower members from historically marginalized groups are important because they help us understand how local appropriations of languages and discourses associated with colonialism provide tools to develop teaching pedagogies that take into account the challenges and possibilities that members from minority communities face. Accordingly, these explorations can help teachers better understand the ways in which they contribute to the oppression or emancipation of their students and communities at large.;To this end, the self-study explores my ownership of the English language as I use the language to share my encounters with colonial experience which illustrate how this appropriation serves as an act of ongoing empowerment that helps overcome the legacy of silence fostered in my historically colonized and marginalized communities. While existing literature is rich theoretically and politically, it does not specifically deal with the specific colonial experience of Puerto Rican English teachers. Therefore, throughout the research I draw on concepts from Post-colonial Theory, Latina Feminism, English Language Teaching (ELT), and Critical Pedagogy which contribute to the framing of a theory that fully encompass Puerto Rican colonial reality. That said, this theory supports the argument that even within the most constraining colonial relationships or conditions, Puerto Ricans have been able to resist their colonial condition and empower themselves through the negotiation and appropriation of the languages and discourses that have historically marginalized them. Consequently, when applied to English language teaching, such a perspective fosters the sharing of these strategies that have been useful to negotiate the cultural and linguistic tensions present within our colonial context. Finally, this perspective also calls for English teachers to reflect on their teaching strategies so that they can accommodate the immediate needs of their students in order to bring about meaningful change to English teaching. |
