Testimonio as a Tool for Resisting, Rewriting, and Reenvisioning School: Hmong and Latina/o/x Bilingual Youth Speak Back

• In Event: Youth Voice, Agency, and Activism as a Future-Making Tool to Reimagine and Enact Inclusive Futures

Abstract

Purpose
Bilingual Hmong and Latina/o/x youth with and without disabilities often experience remedial forms of education, where they are positioned as chronically underperforming (de Brey et al., 2019). Often the source of this underperformance is framed in terms of individual deficits rather than through understandings of the multiple injustices these youth contend with as they navigate educational systems that were not designed for immigrant, bilingual, or non-white students. This study highlights a summer program that re-organized a learning ecology (Gutiérrez & Jurrow, 2016) specifically for bilingual Hmong and Latinx youth with and without disabilities. The GANAS (Gira Académica para Nuestros Alumnos Sociocríticos) summer program was a four-week virtual program that used testimonio as a tool for Hmong and Latina/o/x high school students to historically reflect on their experiences, engage in meaning-making, and re-envision and call for social change (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). This paper highlights the guiding principles and organization of GANAS guided by the following question: In what ways did GANAS, as a re-organize learning ecology, open space for Hmong and Latina/o/x bilingual youth to produce new knowledge through their testimonios?

Theoretical Framework
Cultural historical activity theory (CHAT; Gutiérrez, Engeström, & Sannino, 2016) and theoretical principles of testimonio were critical in thinking about learning and pedagogy. One aspect of CHAT relevant to this study was how people learn across interconnected systems through tool mediated activity (Engeström, 2001). Testimonio can be conceptualized as methodology, pedagogy, and an approach to activism with an overtly political intent, rooted in the experiences of subjugated individuals (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012).

Methods & Data Sources
As part of a larger study, over 57 hours of video data were collected from the program, including participant artifacts and 31 pre- and post-interviews from the youth participants and their parents. Data were analyzed collectively by the GANAS team, consisting of two Chicana faculty members, two research assistants, and two instructors (all of whom were bilingual) using video-informed ethnographic methods (Erickson, 1986). Data analysis was collaborative and cyclical across biweekly meetings as a form of peer debriefing and was accompanied by continuous discussions of researcher power and privilege in relation to the youth participants (The QR Collective, 2023).

Results
Many educational systems bring new instructional methods and fixes into the oppressive systems, yet the very systems that disadvantage minoritized learners remain intact. In GANAS, as an education system, the learning ecology was reorganized through design and through in situ pedagogical co-constructions. The program, as an activity system, designed centering Hmong and Latina/o/xs became a mediator for revisiting and rewriting testimonios of their educational experiences. Youth rewrote their experiences with new understandings rooted in resistance and with calls for Hmong and Latina/o/x re-envisioned futures rooted in their lives.

Scholarly significance
Pedagogical tools such as testimonio can help re-designed learning ecologies by looking to the margins, or borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987; Gutierrez & Jurrow, 2016), in ways that allow bilingual Hmong and Latina/o/x youth to speak back to narratives of underperformance by detailing the inequities they navigate in their educational systems.

Authors

• Taucia Gonzalez, University of Arizona

• Mariana Pacheco, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Na Lor, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Joan J. Hong, University of Maryland

• Kate Roberts, University of Wisconsin - Madison