"We Know Because We've Lived It": Recognizing the Knowledge, Pedagogies, and Community Cultural Literacies of Im/migrant Youth

• In Event: The Literate Lives of Youth of Color: Examining Race, Home, and Displacement

Abstract

Dehumanizing narratives about (im)migrant youth and communities are rooted in legacies of colonialism and, thus, continue to surface particularly in discourses surrounding immigration and the education of immigrant and undocumented children and youth (Yosso, 2005; Delgado Bernal, 2006; Ghiso & Campano, 2013; Patel, 2013). In this paper, the author resists these narratives by drawing on empirical data to expose how im/migrant young people used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Torre & Fine, 2008) to not only disrupt dominant discourses of their community, but also serve as community educators. This study took place in an (im)migrant housing community in the rocky mountain region of the United States. For 7 weeks, 10 youth from mixed status families collaborated with the author to collect and document testimonios from residences in their community. The focus of this paper is specifically on the meaning making that took place over the data collection, analysis, and presentation of findings for the young people. She specifically exposes how the literacies of the youth in this study were reflective of the knowledge they hold and produce and how this knowledge, in turn, shaped their pedagogical decisions and practices. Drawing on pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal, 2006) and Community Responsive Literacies (Curammeng, Lopez, & Tintiangco-Cubales, 2016), the author highlights the ways in which literacies emerged for youth through participatory practices for teaching and learning that are deeply connected to and concerned with the sociopolitical realities of their homes and communities.

In this paper, the author draws on data excepts from youth’s writing, interviews, and multimodal compositions produced throughout the research process as determined and carried out by youth to answer the following research questions: How do the residents of this community define and value community? How do these ideas influence participation in community events? And, how does this community resist and disrupt stereotypes of Mexican, migrant families and communities? The author examines the students’ meaning making processes and practices as they grappled with these questions. Findings for this study illustrate the ways in which youth are researcher-educators and work from a critical desire to engage in both learning and teaching practices. The first finding documents the moments when the young people in the study described and carried out their research, “para aprender” or to learn more about the knowledge and experiences of members of their (im)migrant community, which influenced their methodological decisions along the way. The second finding focuses on the literacy pedagogies of youth and the strategic practices and decisions they made in creating multimodal presentations to engage members in their research findings throughout the community. The discussion and implications of this paper are situated within identifying, being transparent, and working within the tensions that arise when working with youth educator-researchers, and the continued need to collaborate with young people in critical practices of teaching and learning.

Author

• Monica Gonzalez, University of Colorado - Boulder