Zines From the Borderlands: Chicanx/Latinx Preservice Teacher Multimodal Critical Reflections

• In Event: Preservice Teachers of Color Telling Truths: Engaging Multimodal Pedagogies and Methodologies to Document Educational Realities

Abstract

Scholars have highlighted the need for Chicanx/Latinx preservice teachers (PST) to engage in critical reflections at the intersections of language, race, culture, and schooling to create similar opportunities for their future students (Author et al., 2020). Research shows that cultivating strong teacher identities through personal reflection can surface through a variety of modes such as written text (Author et al., 2020), language history maps (Brochin Ceballos, 2012), and oral testimonios (Lara, 2022). Less is known, however, about how multimodal texts such as zines can be used to center on border epistemologies that expand traditional notions of language and literacy. As such, the purpose of this study is to look at the relationship between image and texts and how the curation of zines reflect the epistemologies and lived realities of Chicanx/Latinx PST living on the border.
We draw on border(lands) thinking to expand ideas of multimodality as they relate to Chicanx/Latinx communities, especially to document the ingenuity and embodied ways of reading, writing, and engaging that are involved in the textual productions of those living on the border. A multimodal orientation in the analysis of Image-Texts developed within this context, acknowledges how young people bring together unique modalities to create meaning and unearth new possibilities for border knowledge and realities to be conveyed (Gonzales, 2018).
This was a qualitative study of the zines of 9 Chicanx/Latinx PST, selected at random from the larger data set. For analysis, we focused on the perceptual (Serafini, 2014) and ideo-structural elements (Griffin, 2021) of each zine to get a deeper understanding of how zines were shaped by the PST’s sociopolitical contexts. After each round of analysis, we engaged in pláticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) to process understandings and identify the themes emerging across zines.
The findings of this study demonstrate how Latinx PST use multimodality strategically to display their border epistemologies and lived experience by drawing on the everyday practices of communities and families situated on the border. Specifically, the Latinx PST anchor their multimodal representations within pop culture, local media outlets, and cultural references of the U.S.-Mexico border as a complex backdrop for their individual and collective experiences as a community. This includes representations of border-tongues through the use of translanguaging, familial knowledge, relationships, and history, as well as politics of the region. Collectively, the analysis of the data demonstrates how Latinx PST utilized a variety of modes to creatively make decisions about how to tell their stories.
Reimagining borderlands education and discourses require approaches that center on future advocacy and activism through Chicanx/Latinx critical border-crossing epistemologies and pedagogy. For those who were raised and experienced schooling on the border, it is imperative that their teacher preparation includes opportunities to critically reflect and consider pedagogical tools, like zines, to engage their future students with meaningful borderlands content and unsettle deficit discourses, white-centric curriculum, and monolingual-monocultural national practices and ideologies.

Authors

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

• Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author