Educators as Co-Agitators: Collaborating With Parents Across Borders and Dis/abilities

• In Event: Centering Belonging in DisCrit: Toward the Dismantling of "Citizenship" and Imagined Boundaries

Abstract

Objectives:
Drawing from a study with mixed-status families with children with dis/abilities in Mexico, we demonstrate how educators can join families as co-agitators to actively work against interlocking systems of oppression that deny educational opportunities to children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. We argue for the urgency of practices that visibly engage with border-crossing parents as co-agitators to collectively begin to unhinge the interlocking systems of oppression within and across national contexts that deny bilingual children with dis/abilities rigorous educational experiences, family support, and their humanity.

Framework:
We draw upon a transborder DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013)
framing to bring explicit attention to how undocumentedness compounds how race and dis/ability shape children’s educational experiences. Rather than measuring how well border-crossing families assimilate, transborder frameworks explore how folx draw upon their experiences across varying national systems in ways that embody an in-betweeness of both countries, that pushes against rigid mononational and monolingual expectations (Anzaldúa, 1987; Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020; Mignolo, 2000). A transborder DisCrit framing is anchored in the mobility and multiplicity of people’s lived realities to better reflect families’ movement, dreaming, and exclusions within and across the national systems of their diasporic homes.

Methods:
We draw from a yearlong critical ethnographic study conducted in Mexican schools with students who had recently arrived from the United States. Study methods entailed participant observation in schools, community gatherings, workshops, and families’ homes as well as interviews and artifacts that provided descriptive validity across timescales and sources.

Data:
We open-coded (Saldaña 2015) the corpus of data, iteratively refining each code and its description. Here we focus on codes such as ‘dis/ability, ‘‘transborder,’ and ‘dreaming.’

Results:
We demonstrate how parents drew upon their transborder expertise from life at the margins to name and push against the systemic inequities that shaped their children’s educational opportunities, serving as agitators (Staples, 2010; Toliver, 2021) who acted out against injustice across incompatible national systems that dehumanized their children with dis/abilities. Yet educators’ engagement with parents differed. Educators in one school dismissed a mother’s transborder knowledges and located the problem within her child, his limited language, and the structures of Mexican schooling. In contrast, educators in the second school sought to learn from his father’s transborder experiences and worked in solidarity with him as a co-agitator to collectively create small ruptures in the systemic oppression they faced within and across borders, seeking to “hacer maravillas,” or make miracles happen alongside families to support students with dis/abilities.

Significance:
Educators across borders often feel unsure of how to make sense of the experiences of im/migrant students’ with dis/abilities, how to advocate for them within highly constrained educational systems, or how to understand and collaborate with their caregivers who may be physically present or parenting across geopolitical borders. This paper offers a window into how educators can begin to un-do deficit discourses about transborder families and their children with dis/abilities and offers insights on how to break open spaces within educational systems to agitate in solidarity with them.

Authors

• Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Anel V. Rivera Guerrero, Rutgers Graduate School of Education
  Presenting Author