Co-Creating a Woman of Color Preservice Teacher Collective Through Pláticas

• In Event: Cultivating Girl and Women of Color Collective Spaces: Reimagining Pedagogies and Methodologies That Center Our Stories and Language and Literacy Practices

Abstract

Teacher education programs have positioned preservice teachers of color (PSTOC) in ways that have marginalized, tokenized, and erased their language and literacy practices and experiences (Brown, 2014; Haddix, 2017). Recent critical literacy scholarship, however, repositions PSTOC in ways that honor and validate their languages and literacies (Haddix, 2010; Player et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2021). Some of this scholarship focuses on co-created spaces with PSTOC beyond teacher education classrooms as a means to center their stories, experiences and lived realities (Harmon & Horn, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). Building from such scholarship, this paper shares the pláticas that emerged within a Woman of Color preservice teacher collective at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in the Midwest. Through the collective pláticas, the author unveils the stories, experiences, and meaning-making practices of WOC preservice teachers.

Women of Color (WOC) feminisms collectively situate how race, gender, class, sexuality, citizenship, nationhood, settler colonialism, and white supremacy are inextricably tied to the various experiences, histories, and lived realities of Women of Color (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Grande, 2004; Lorde, 1984). The author draws from WOC feminisms to engage in plática (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) to illuminate how WOC preservice teachers (PST) cultivate a space of community across differences. Plática offers ways for WOC PST to share their lived experiences and language and literacy, meaning making practices as they gather in a collective/community space.

This qualitative study focuses on the pláticas that emerged within a WOC PST collective. Through a WOC feminist lens and methodological process, the author engaged with and alongside the Latina PST, sharing their experiences and language and literacy practices. Through plática, they created a space of co-theorizing which provided an opportunity to make sense of their racial, ethnic, and gendered experiences as WOC. In addition to their language and literacy practices as they shared their daily lived realities as WOC PST.

This paper centers the experiences, stories, and language and literacy practices of WOC within a WOC PST collective at an HSI. Through their pláticas they engaged in a process of meaning-making to reveal how they navigate their experiences as WOC and particularly, WOC PST. In doing so, the collective served as a community space where WOC PST could gather and share vulnerably, reciprocally, and reflexively as they shared, listed, and witnessed their peers’ stories and experiences. Plática offers a way to illuminate the complex, real, and multidimensional experiences of WOC PST, and provides space to understand the value of collective WOC spaces for PST (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016). Thus it is imperative that educators across k-12 schooling and teacher education to not only make space to embrace the identities, knowledges, knowings of their students, but honor the spaces they create.

Author

• Adrianna González Ybarra, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley