“With These Hands”: Latina Adolescent Girls Composing and Constructing New, Upgraded Worlds

• In Event: Civic Collaborative Learning Spaces: Reimagining the Civic Across Disciplines and Contexts

Abstract

Objectives:
I center the experiences of Latina girls (grades 6-8) as participants in [Program Name] (blinded for review), a writing and art workshop that invites them to use art, writing, and storytelling as tools of examination of self and world (Author, 2023). During workshops, girls created art and composed personal stories addressing the tensions they navigate as Latina girls at the intersections of age, language, and culture. Through the composing and sharing of experiences, girls collaboratively constructed a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), in which they begin to (re)claim their identities, stories, languages, and worlds.

Theoretical Framework:
In exploring the pedagogical possibilities (Villenas & Moreno, 2001) of girls creating, writing, and storytelling in [Program Name], I turn to Gutiérrez’s (2008) theorization of Third Space as the “transformative space where the potential for an expanded form of learning and the development of new knowledge are heightened” (p. 152). From this perspective, [Program Name] works within and against a sociopolitical context prevalent with book bans of BIPOC stories, discriminatory LGBTQIA policies, and narratives of “learning loss.” Additionally, I center research conducted by scholars who have worked alongside Black and Latina girls in intentionally designed literacy spaces that tend to their cultural/gendered ways of knowing and being thus expanding notions of writing, literacies, and girlhood (Brown, 2013; Garcia & Gaddes, 2012; Muhammad, 2014; 2015).

Methods & Data Sources:
I designed this study using humanizing ethnographic methods (Paris & Winn, 2014) with six Latina girls (grades 6-8) over the course of two summers and across two iterations of [Program Name]. Located in the Southwest, the program is facilitated by a university faculty member, teacher candidates, and in-service teachers, who all self-identify as Latina women. Constant comparative methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) were used to analyze the data which included ethnographic field notes, girls’ art and writing samples, qualitative interviews (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), and researcher journal. I coded all data by hand using descriptive and invivo coding methods (Saldana, 2016). Throughout my analysis, I wrote analytic memos to capture all aspects of analysis and theorizing.

Results:
Across the data, I identified three themes: (Re)claiming identities and stories, strengthening peer relationships, and constructing new worlds. First, in creating artwork and compositions, Latina girls examined their lives within the historical and current sociopolitical context, dismantling static views of their identities and stories and defining themselves outside of Eurocentric views of beauty and imposed stereotypes. Second, as girls discussed their experiences with each other, they developed empathy and new understandings of one another, strengthening their peer relationships. Third, through their writing, girls drew upon the teachings of their ancestors, to construct new worlds that center freedoms, social justice, and human rights.

Scholarly Significance:
[Program Name] blurs the lines of the formal and informal by allowing girls freedom from censorship of ideas and permission to draw from their rich linguistic, cultural, and literate practices in the creation of art and compositions from their lives to construct new, upgraded worlds.

Author

• Tracey Terece Flores, University of Texas at Austin