Reimagining Teacher Education in Puerto Rico: From Scarcity to Possibilities Through Anticolonial Literary Engagements

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

Abstract

This paper adds a study within a teacher education program at a local University. We document the possibilities of breaking through cycles of colonial literacy education in the archipelago. The study of social justice picture books from the Global South serves to re-read local justice narratives in relation to those produced in picture books from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Research questions
· How do social justice narratives from the Global South, serve for the transformation of ideologies related to teacher literacy education within a colonized curriculum? How does the repositioning of anti-colonial knowledges support new forms of counternarratives in critical literacy work?

This work is grounded on an expansive view of critical literacy as anti-colonial actionings (Tuck & Gaztambide, 2013; Zavala, 2016; author & author 2021) and the construction of new social futures rooted on a counter literary imagination (Morrison, 2015; Pérez, 1999; Thomas, 2016). We perceive as urgent considering the consequences of whose ways of knowing get foregrounded in literacy work (Santos, 2016). The work of Quijano (2000) and Mignolo (2007), invite us to explore new literary imaginaries out of the dominant Western modern structures, allowing us to reconfigure and create ruptures to read and interpret otherwise. From an anti-colonial literary imaginary (Anzaldúa, 1987; Danticat, 2011; Morrison, 2007; Perez, 1999) this means that histories are reconfigured and new politics established through a “conscious effort to retool, to shift meanings and read against the grain” (Pérez, 1999, p. xvii).

This study is designed as descriptive case studies (Yin, 2009). The criteria for the selection of two cases was the participants’ distinct views on issues of race, local activism and growth as critically engaged educators. The duration of this study was four years. Activities focused on the creation of a critical literacy teacher collective that began when participants were pre-service teachers taking literacy methods, moving to student teaching and then as practitioner educators. We met to explore through discussions and multimodal responses, Latin American and Caribbean picture books as tools to help educators relate trajectories of social struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean with the current social struggles Puerto Ricans face. Methods of data collection included video recording of virtual and presential workshops, collection of artifacts produced, analysis of participants' choices of picture books, literacy autobiographies and interviews. Data analysis follows anti-colonial methods, looking at the data as stories and searching for the emergence of counternarratives, tensions and possibilities as participants make sense of their relationship between the literature and their immediate socio-political world (Patel, 2015; Weis & Fine, 2012).

The case studies provide visibility to the process of wrestling with literary, personal, and political counternarratives. Three themes center this presentation: literature and everyday political upheavals, activism as communal practice, and formations of social imaginaries with literature.

Authors

• Carmen L. Medina, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Maria del Rocio Costa, University of Puerto Rico - Bayamón
  Presenting Author