Middle School Latino Boys and Critical Pedagogy in the Third Space

• In Event: 72.025 - Abriendo Brecha: Third Spaces, Heterogeneity, and Social Justice in the New Latino Diaspora

Abstract

This paper discusses ongoing research with middle-school aged Latino boys in the community of Marshall, PA, a New Latino Diaspora (NLD) (Hamann, Wortham, & Murillo Jr., 2002) town. As with many NLD sites across the U.S., Marshall has experienced rapid growth of its Latino community, from 2.7% in 1990 to 28.3% in 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). This shift has created a unique setting in which Latino youth are challenged by a schooling environment that is largely unfamiliar with them. As such, cultural and linguistic differences can serve to marginalize students and overlook their daily, lived experience. This marginalization endangers the academic achievement prospects of students already encountering difficulty keeping pace with their peers (NCES, 2010).

The author argues that a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) in the form a local community center technology room re-engages these students in a way that is distinct from the norms of “schooling”. The technology room offers these Latino boys an environment in which they can explore computer programming and digital literacy pursuits and engage in self-directed learning, fostering behaviors and characteristics associated with academic achievement.

This self-directed learning evolves out of a critical pedagogy framework. The researcher works as coordinator (Freire, 1973), with a two-pronged approach of developing skills and fostering sociocritical awareness (Gutiérrez, 2008). This occurs by first taking into account the participants’ vocabular universe – the topics related to technology in which the boys voice interest. Some examples include software programming for smartphone apps, personal computers, and gaming, as well as filmmaking. The coordinator then provides scaffolding activities, one example begins with a dialogue about the participants’ favorite films. In a later session, the coordinator provided clips of one of those film that spoke to themes of unequal power relations with the purpose of commencing a dialogue of how similar power relations emerge in the participants’ lived-experience. The results of this research approach include developing technological skills such as communicating via email, managing digital communications, understanding privacy and social media concerns, and practice using web-based software programming. In addition, this critical pedagogical methodology provides an avenue to conscientization, or the awareness of the participants’ transformative power in the world.

This research is significant because Latino boys are particularly vulnerable to academic disengagement (Sáenz & Ponjuan, 2009). In large numbers this disengagement will have pejorative consequences given the Hispanic population of the U.S. is projected to rise from 17.8% to 30.6% between 2015 and 2060 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Utilizing third space educational opportunities for the purpose of critical pedagogical interventions with middle-school Latino boys provides them with the development of academically proficient behaviors and characteristics that they can integrate into a schooling environment. Further, it allows for the practice of critical awareness that is valuable in the context of schooling and in one’s daily life.

Author

• Carlos Martínez-Cano, University of Pennsylvania