Effects of Multimodal Testimonio Curriculum Preservice Teacher Lab on Educationally Vulnerable High School Latinx Students

• In Event: 43.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 43.077-2 - Critical Praxis, Intersectionality, and Truth-Telling in Secondary and Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Objective: Testimonio challenges the educational power structure and the too-often unquestioned understanding of what constitutes “legitimate knowledge” in the classroom in a way that centers multimodal learning relevant to the lives of Latinx students. The “history and form of Testimonio unfolds within Latin American and Southwest Chicanx literature, music, poetry, speeches, and visual and performative art created by those who have stood against governmental silencing and domination throughout history” (Sosa-Provencio, 2017, p. 2). By centering both Latin American testimonio narrative content and its collective, social justice, student-centered pedagogical approach, testimonio centers multiple literacies that students possess in order to engage them and make them co-owners of their education. The objective of this work is to analyze the effects of this approach on educationally vulnerable Latinx students from a socioeconomically marginal neighborhood. How does participation in this critical approach affect credit recovery students in terms of empowerment, school success, personal life, and self-actualization?

Framework: We situate this case study within a Chicana Feminist framework which centers students’ multiple literacies, home pedagogies, and ways of knowing to critique and bring about pedagogies of social justice and healing within dominant schools which often reproduce existing social stratifications (Delgado Bernal, 1998).

Methodology: We utilize youth participatory action research (YPAR) in this study, positioning youth central to data collection and analysis (Cammarota, 2017). One YPAR method utilized is PhotoVoice, a participatory or community research method that allows student participants to “represent their world with their own photographs, which they then analyze to surface their meaning” in the form of free-writes or reflections (Wilson et al., 2007).

Data Collection/Analysis: Data collection included multiple individual semi-structured interviews with credit recovery high school students as well as individual semi-structured interviews with their parents. One YPAR focus group utilizes PhotoVoice to elicit student data. Coding schema and analysis was developed alongside high school students within a collective, recursive Xicana Sacred Space (Diaz Soto et al., 2009) which honors especially marginalized knowledge.

Findings: Youth reveal that the curriculum lab enables collective creation of knowledge, flexible organic curriculum, multimodal aesthetic curriculum, authentic respect and care which transcends the interpersonal (Valenzuela, 1999), shared power, and privileging of funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Students express a deepening of academic identities and sense of self.

Significance: This study may support policy recommendations that could affect the epistemological approaches employed in schools. For every 100 Latinx students that enroll in school, only 8 will successfully complete a BA, 2 will earn a graduate or professional degree, and .2 will go on to successfully earn a PhD) (Yosso & Solórzano, 2012). Findings may also deepen examination as to student-centered, collective, and critical pedagogical approaches which not only lead to higher levels of graduation for students of color but have the potential of changing the trajectory of the Latinx education pipeline.

Authors

• Emily Castillo, University of New Mexico

• Mia Sosa-Provencio, The University of New Mexico