Writer's Workshop and Testimonio: Creating Spaces for Collective Healing in School

• In Event: 31.090 - Radicalizing Writer's Workshop: Disrupting Monolingual Language Ideologies Through Multimodal and Multilingual Practices

Abstract

Objectives: Literacy scholars have noted the importance of creating spaces for students from historically oppressed communities (Hoyte et al., 2017; Muhammad, 2012; Sutherland, 2005) through writing experiences that counter curricular practices that silence, marginalize, and devalue their lived experiences, linguistic, and cultural knowledge. Testimonio, a Latin American genre, involves the sharing of oppressive acts and injustice to raise awareness, build solidarity and promote healing (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Cruz, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Pérez Huber, 2009).

Theoretical framework: Chicana feminist scholars have begun to explore the ways that testimonio in educational contexts repositions Latinx language and culture (Delgado-Bernal, 1998, and supports students in seeing themselves as knowledge producers (Saavedra, 2011).

Methods and data sources: This qualitative case study (Stake, 1995) examined the use of testimonios through a writer’s workshop format in one ninth-grade English class within a dual language high school. The study took place in a large urban district in the Midwest. The English teacher and her Latinx bilingual students read testimonios on bilingualism and schooling written by former bilingual students from the same school district. They identified common themes across the testimonios and engaged in the process of testimoniando (Pérez-Huber, 2009) the naming of ones’ experiences and knowledge through reading, writing, sharing and witnessing testimonios.

Results: Through engaging in this process the students created new sense of commonality across their experiences. This enabled them to develop new understandings about one another and rectify misunderstandings that had deterred students from participating in whole group lessons. Through the analysis of the testimonios they identified ways that dominant ideologies shaped their sense of their own knowledge and knowledge production. Through the writing of their own testimonios the identified their linguistic strengths, knowledge from their families, and envisioned new possibilities for themselves. This collective process of reading, writing, thining, discussing, and re-examining their assumptions contributed to a sense of healing.

Scholarly significance: Utilizing mentor texts in the form of testimonios and enabling students to re-conceptualize their thoughts on knowledge and one another provides insight into ways that writing workshop can support students across languages and ability levels at the secondary level. This study adds to literacy research that emphasizes the significance of students’ accessing all of their linguistic and cultural resources for learning.

Authors

• Christina P. Denicolo, Wayne State University

• Carol Brochin, The University of Arizona