Cultivating Critical Community Literacies in the Midst of Antimigrant Hegemony

• In Event: 73.061 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 73.061-2 - Toward Pedagogies for Liberation and Transformation: The Possibilities of Humanizing Pedagogies

Abstract

In this ethnographic case study, I examine how a collaboration emerged and evolved between low-income Latin@ families, a day labor center, and a high poverty high school in California. I elucidate all three sets of community members’ participation in a unit on im/migration in a high school Ethnic Studies course that centered community organizing and the Mexican Catholic tradition of honoring las posadas to advocate for im/migrant rights. Specifically, I examine how students’ producing a short-form video on immigration allows them to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions and public discourses on immigration, thereby producing new representations of the relationships between these spaces. Using a community of practice framework, I convey the role of parents, students, teachers and day laborers involved in a grassroots collaboration of organizing posadas for social justice in their localized communities. This emergent model stands in contrast to traditional partnerships between communities and school leadership that often reflects deficit conceptions of marginalized parents and families

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, Teachers College, Columbia University