Latinx Youth Mental Mapping of Place and Place-Making

• In Event: Conceptualizing Spatial Justice in Education: Creating, Navigating, and Surviving Racialized Space through Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objective
Majority-Latinx schools provide a particularly useful lens to understand how Latinx students make, shape and negotiate school space through everyday forms of cultural expression. This paper describes how mental mapping by students at a majority-Latinx high school reveals how they bring their culture, identity, community context or history—their cultural expression —into school spaces to make places of social belonging, membership and meaning within their schools.

Framework
I utilize particular concepts (place, place-making) and methods (mental mapping) to conceptualize schools as social spaces that are made meaningful, shaped, and reimagined by students. Place is space which is lived and meaningful to the people within it while place-making are the activities enacted to make that space meaningful (Halttunen, 2006). I interpret Latinx youth cultural expression as a form of place-making that impacts the schools they attend. Mental mapping (Gregory et al., 2009) involves hand-drawn, sketch maps to represent the ways space is organized through personal stories, meaning, experiences, pictures, etc.

Methods
This paper focuses on the experiences of four students and draws from several data sources: 1) individual student-drawn mental maps of the school, 2) one semi-structured, in-depth interview with each student, 3) at least three observations of students in their everyday life at school, and 4) one focus group interview with other study participants. Using a grounded theory (Willis, 2007) method that focuses on the interpretive process of analysis, conceptual themes guided the coding scheme for all other data sources and these themes were later reconfigured to capture the meaning that emerge from all data sources.

Findings
From their mental maps I found that students were particularly drawn to only one or two spaces of the school. In their explanation of what they mapped, they all shared that these were places where they felt like they belonged and were connected to the school because they contributed to the creation of those places. Their home and community context informed these efforts. For example, in their interviews they described their community as a place where people go through hardships but there is also resiliency, unity and hard work that happens. What they see happen in their community impacts or motivates them to make school places to benefit others and the overall school environment. Similarly, they all identify strongly with the experiences of their family, both here in the U.S. and in the countries where they are from, and have learned how to be leaders at school because of them.

Scholarly Significance
Consistent with claims by geographers that space is produced and is a social product (Lefebvre 1991; Soja, 1996), schools are not simply spaces that youth occupy. They are also places that they make and shape with cultural expression—their place-making. By thinking critically about student mental mapping of social belonging, membership and meaning within schools, results from this study may inform educators’ efforts to create schools that are equitable for Latinx youth that support students’ community context, history, culture and identity while also supporting their enactment of agency in schools.

Author

• Claudia Diera, California State University - Los Angeles