Witnessing and Listening Within Margins: Acompañando Multilingual Black and Brown Youth Reimagining Their Worlds

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 3:35 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Centering Multilingual Literacies and Practices (Table 6)

Abstract

This paper argues for critical educational researchers to attend to alternative ways of seeing and listening while walking beside and with students to affirm and honor their multiple language and literacy practices. Drawing from Black and Chicana feminisms, we theorize relational and embodied engagements and bring these perspectives in conversation with Sepúlveda’s (2011) Pedagogy of Acompañamiento to emphasize the importance of letting youth and children lead. By centering research engagements that travel with, walk beside, and alongside those living on or at the margins of social and community displacement, our inquiries share how dignity-filled, self-reflexive and embodied approaches nourish liminal understandings that radically reimagine seeing and listening in-community as deep-seated knowledge.

Authors

• Cecilia Angélica Valenzuela, University of San Diego

• Reka C. Barton, University of Maryland