Testimonios of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Language Educators: Where Are We in Youth Participatory Action Research?

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Six
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Language Awareness: Consequential Truth(s) in Multilingual Contexts (Table 14)

Abstract

Within the current climate of deliberate racist and xenophobic attacks on BIPOC populations and glaring health disparities within the COVID-19 pandemic, we redesigned our youth participatory action program in the southeast of the United States to support multilingual youth and language educators in using critical artmaking to generate “good trouble” (Lewis, 2018). In this presentation, we feature the lived experiences and reflections of two feminist educators of color who participated in our summer YPAR program. Specifically, we used tenets from critical race theory and LatCrit to co-construct testimonios with a Caribbean Afro Latina educator and a Southeast Asian educator that function as embodied witnessing of racial, classed and gendered injustices and potential transformation of oppressive teaching practices. The testimonios include descriptions of the YPAR praxis generated by the educators with youth as they worked online, discussing and selecting an array of modes and materials (e.g., discussion, visual art, poetry, online videos, rapping) to create multimodal assemblages related to justice praxis on a communal website.

The purpose of this presentation is three-fold. First, this work aims to make visible the vulnerability, enthusiasm, and resistance of feminist educators of color, whose voices are often missing in YPAR literature (Wynter-Hoyt et al., 2020). Their intersectional identities can be fertile grounds for forging allyship with youth of color and supporting the co-development of antiracist and anti-bias teaching in education. Second, testimonios are used as a valuable tool that shed light on the reflective narratives and practices generated by focal educators of color when immersed in YPAR. Third, the presentation unpacks the ways that creative and embodied practices with youth can support educators in developing critical semiotic awareness of the nexus of language, ideology, and institutional/sociopolitical contexts.

Authors

• Shuang Fu, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Ruth Harman, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Yamileth Aubain, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author