Becoming Literate Beyond the White Gaze: Art-Making as Speculative Power in Adult ESOL Education

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Sixteen
  In Roundtable Session: Arts-Based Educational Research in Search of Educational Justice (Table 6)

Abstract

Although the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s adult education branch has made a recent policy shift to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, it is yet to be researched how adult English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students articulate their identities and access needs through a raciolinguistic framework. Combining feminist participatory action research with identity text pedagogy, as an arts-based educational research methodology, this project documents how adult ESOL students define their raciolinguistic identities through making and analyzing identity texts using artistic modalities. Our project reveals the speculative power that artmaking as a community practice in ESOL classrooms has to provide liberatory Translanguaging Space for students to express their raciolinguistic identities beyond the White gaze.

Author

• Jana Pickart, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Presenting Author