Kaleidoscopic Role Re-visions: A Queer, Aztec Autoethnographic Perspective on Locally Novel Parapedagogies

This work is an autoethnographic assessment of emergent career navigation and instructional coach processes and implementation through queer and Aztec lenses. This autoethnographic methodology and these theoretical lenses have useful applications for the contextualization and making fruitful of these parapedagogical fields, especially when these fields are novel in minority-abundant spaces. The worlding of events in these fields using the Aztec ontoepistemological frameworks of olin, malinalli, and nepantla are a critical part – in both senses of the term – of this exercise. The work concludes with a poetic reflection through the textually layered and polysemic Aztec tradition of in xochitl in cuicatl on both the autoethnographic approach to these parapedagogical fields and the requirements of the fields themselves. The kaleidoscopic (multi-perspectival) affordances of queer and Aztec lenses to parapedagogy are therein affirmed as valuable vehicles for self-growth as a professional; the respecting of others, their experiences, and their needs in the pedagogical space; and sustained program flexibility.