Papers, Migra, y El Otro Lado: Designing Spaces for Testimonio Pedagogies

• In Event: 60.037 - Designing Possible Futures for Youth From Nondominant Communities: Teaching, Learning, and Designing in the El Pueblo Mágico Ecology

Abstract

Through testimonio, students begin to understand their lived realities within a historicized context and have the potential to imagine other possibilities, thus reading the world in a more socio-critical way (Gutiérrez, 2008). The genre of testimonio is most notably recognized for its roots in Latin America, particularly for its use in documenting and voicing experiences of marginalization (Delgado Bernal, et. al., 2012; Burgos-Debray, 1984; Latina Feminist Group, 2001). Testimonio strongly aligns with the feminista tradition of theorizing from the body to break silences and name injustices to motivate social change (Delgado Bernal, et.al, 2012). As such, a pedagogy of testimonio sees these experiences and traumas as platforms for teaching and learning. Designing for testimonio creates a learning space where students’ lived realities reframe knowledge legitimacy, as well as its production and producers. The pedagogical practice actively works to de-normalize dominant knowledge and disrupt ideas of valued epistemologies for students and educators.

Open to rupture and re-design, EPM as a social design experiment allowed for a testimonio project to flourish. According to Gutiérrez & Vossoughi (2010), social design experiments “create spaces to experiment pedagogically, to design collective Third Spaces that heighten the potential for deep learning to occur and for the development of powerful literacies that facilitate social change” (p.102). The possibilities of social design experiment through a Chicana feminist frame, allowed for a pedagogy of testimonio to move further towards transformative learning. The testimonio project became an option for all students at EPM, but only consistently pursued by two, second grade students. A focal text, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Friends From the Other Side/ Amigos del Otro Lado (1997) , was used to facilitate the testimonio process. In line with my understanding of the students’ community, the book highlights the tensions of the geopolitical Mexican-US border by narrating the friendship of a young Chicana, Prietita, and her new friend, Joaquin, an undocumented boy living in her neighborhood.

Through the testimonio project, students began a decolonizing process where their realities as young Chicanas/Mexicanas became the source of their literacy practices, which I term decolonial literacy practices. Testimonio pedagogy, thus, facilitated a space for decolonial literacy practices in three ways: (1) Amigos del Otro Lado guided and engaged discussions of marginalization, which highlighted ways in which students made sense of their experiences; (2) Anzaldúa’s hybrid text stimulated testimonio in the moments where students shared their own stories of marginalization during reading or discussing the text; (3) Students enacted agency through their story-telling, in which the call to action became a desire to give and share testimonio. Literacy scholars (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gee, 2012) have argued that literacy is a cultural practice that is always being enacted. As such, I argue that decolonial literacies are continuously practiced by students of color, whose lives and histories have been shaped by colonialism. These literacy practices are often devalued or left out of the classroom. Designing for testimonio has the ability to facilitate spaces where these stories can be understood as transformative re-imaginations for teaching and learning.

Author

• Monica Gonzales, University of Colorado - Boulder