Chicas and Mujeres Fuertes: Latina and Chicana Girls and Women Authoring Their Futures Through Writing

• In Event: Latina/Chicana Scholars Speak to Literacy Teaching and Learning for and Within Diverse Community Contexts

Abstract

This presentation illuminates the voices and stories of 13 Latina girls and four facilitators as they participated in [Program Name]. [Program Name], a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6-12), was developed by a Chicana teacher educator and co-facilitated by a group of Chicana pre-service teachers (PTs) and doctoral students from a university in the Southwest. At [Program Name], facilitators invite girls to draw, write and perform stories from their lives and together examine themes related to language, culture and gender (Author, 2018). During seven daylong sessions, we reflected on our lived experiences and selected stories rooted in our “pedagogies of the home” (Delgado Bernal, 2001) to craft and share with each other.
To understand [Program Name], and the Latina girls and facilitators who participated, and the ways they performed and self- authored their lives, I draw upon Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain’s concept of “figured worlds” (1998). According to Holland et. al. (1998) a figured world is “a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (p. 52). Within [Program Name], in which girls and facilitators, came together to create, write and share of themselves, workshops served as a “figured world” wherein we could collectively dream and reimagine ourselves and our worlds. The concept of figured worlds is important in considering the ways that Latina girls and women are positioned in society and within schools-- at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status (Urrieta, 2007).
As a participant observer (Spradley, 2016), I wrote and worked alongside girls and facilitators, to conduct a case study (Dyson & Gehnisi, 2005) of workshops. Drawing upon field notes, writing and art samples, interview transcripts and video recordings of workshops, I provide insights into how within the figured world of [Program Name] girls and facilitators used writing, artwork and personal stories from their lives to author and define themselves in ways that contradict assigned scripts and stereotypes (Kinloch, 2017). In addition, PTs and graduate students drew upon their pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal, 2001) and cultural and linguistic resources (Yosso, 2005) to develop curriculum relevant to girls’ lives and foster caring relationships.
Implications highlight the power of spaces like [Program Name], that engage Latina girls, PTs and graduate students’ existing cultural and linguistic resources in culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) ways to further develop their voices, languages and writing (Author, 2018). In addition, this work points to the ways that we can redesign teacher education to center the epistemologies of Teachers of Color, in this case, Chicana PTs and graduate students, rather than continuing to replicate a “[w]hiteness centered teacher education” (Haddix, 2017) experience. [Program Name] provides a concrete example of the ways that writing, art and being together can serve as powerful intervention for working with Latina girls, PTs and graduate students that honor and celebrate their literacies and many ways of knowing and being.

Author

• Tracey Terece Flores, The University of Texas at Austin