"Me pregunto ¿qué aprendemos?" Testimonios of Puerto Rican Youth Amid the Dismantling of Public Schools

• In Event: Interrogating the Dismantling of Public Education in Puerto Rico: Testimonios as Acts of Resistance and Reimagining

Abstract

The testimonios collected through this project document the experiences and reflections of participants from the Center for University Access (CUA), an educational justice program for underserved youth in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, operating at UPR-Mayagüez since 2007. Since hurricanes Irma and María in 2017 students have faced unprecedented challenges caused by natural and politician-made disasters including: two hurricanes, seismic activity, school closings, depleted resources for special education and a poorly handled COVID pandemic. Our objective is to generate individual and collective narrations of these experiences to imbue currently limited understanding of educational inequalities and injustices in Puerto Rico's ailing public education system.

Recognizing the inequities that exist in educational opportunities in the archipelago, and their strong relation to racial and social stratification, the CUA foments academic aspirations and provides support to students from grades 7th-12th and college. Its research component seeks to understand and document the inequities faced by underserved youth while highlighting how they experience, understand, and resist these in localized practices that reveal counterhegemonic educational journeys. Our research foregrounds the notion of educational justice as a tool to diagnose injustices in the public school system and as a framework to enact transformations to co-create more just relationships, institutions, and societies (Aguilar-Nery, 2017, p. 8).

The testimonios were collected by 28 participants, with guidance from student mentors and faculty coordinators during the Center’s summer camp in 2022. Participants received training in personal writing, interview guide design, and interviewing. Subsequently, they collectively developed an interview protocol and conducted interviews with peers. These were then transcribed by CUA staff to be shaped into a manuscript co-authored with participants, which will be published by the Puerto Rico Humanities Foundation.

The data includes the testimonios produced through oral history interviews and self-portraits developed with support from a local artist during the summer camp.

These testimonios demonstrate the inequities that exist in Puerto Rico for students in the public education system, particularly for those living in extreme poverty. They are a powerful representation of truth in educational justice initiatives and the value of personal accounts in research with youth. These will generate a uniquely and timely polyvocal text that will add nuance to ongoing debates about the dismantling of public education in the archipelago as the result of natural and human-made disasters.

Employing a humanizing research methodology (Paris & Winn, 2014) CUA staff positioned themselves against common extractive research practices, facilitating the process for data collection and manuscript development with participants as primary agents. Conducting work where participants are at the forefront and ensuring that their truths and interpretations are accounted for is central to social and educational justice practices. As facilitators, the staff ensured that the testimonios gathered through participatory research were not just turned into "scholarly data" for one more academic publication. Our study demonstrates that something as qualitative as educational justice cannot result merely from improving quantitative variables. Educational justice advances to the extent that unjust and unequal social conditions, barriers and relations (including research relations) are collectively transformed (Latapí, 2012).

Authors

• Sandra L Soto-Santiago, University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez
  Presenting Author

• Jocelyn A. Geliga Vargas, University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez
  Presenting Author