Exploring Chicana/Latina Feminist Pedagogies in a Literacy Methods Classroom in the Borderlands

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Collective Reimaginings: Women of Color Storying and Transforming Teacher Education

Abstract

Chicana/Latina feminist scholars in education have emphasized the cultural, linguistic, and ancestreal ways of knowing that exist within Chicanx/Latinx homes, families, communities (Delgado Bernal, 2002; Elenes, 2010; Saavedra, 2011;Yosso, 2005). Theoretical and empirical research has highlighted how looking at the teaching and learning practices that exist in these spaces reveals deep intellectual practices, strategies of survival, and immense joy (Cervantes-Soon, 2017; Delgado Bernal, 2006; Trinidad Galvan, 2006; Villenas, 2005). This knowledge, teaching, and learning, however rarely make their way into literacy methods courses and thus, leave preservice teachers with very little understanding of how to create classroom environments that truly honor and draw upon student’s cultural and linguistic knowledge. As such, this paper looks at the power and possibilities of Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies in a university literacy methods classroom with Latinx preservice teachers.
This paper draws on Chicana/Latina feminisms (Anzaldua, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Perez, 2002), to understand pedagogy and the possibilities it has for literacy and working with Latinx preservice teachers at a Hispanic Service Institution on the U.S.-Mexico border. Chicana feminist perspectives of education center alternative sites for knowledge production such as the home, community spaces, the border/lands as well as highlight the practices for teaching and learning that exist within Chicanx/Latinx families and communities. This theoretical approach offers tools to highlight the wealth of knowledge and linguistic practices Latinx preservice teachers bring to their literacy methods classrooms, and how that knowledge and language can be leveraged for practicing and modeling Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies in the classroom.
This study is grounded in Chicana/Latina feminist methodological approaches (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, Flores Carmona, 2017; Quinones, 2016) and thus, draws from data collected through pláticas, testimonios, as well as obersvation, cultural and multmodal artifacts, and critical reflection. Findings from this study demonstrate how Latinx preservice teachers draw on their cultural and linguistic resources to re-think dominant ideas of knowledge production and how their own reflective process informs their emerging pedagogies as future educators. This project reveals the reflective work required in methods courses to transform preservice teacher learning experiences, and thus adds to the scholarship and critical conversations taking place in the field dedicated to practicing humanizing pedagogies in the classroom (Paris & Winn, 2014; Sealy-Ruiz, 2018).

Author

• Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign