Quilting Migration Histories: Fostering Rightful Presence Through Teacher and Student Agentic Design Across Multiple Disciplines

• In Event: Sense of Place: Context, Indigeneity, and Migration

Abstract

Consequential education must give teachers access to practices that enable them to create spaces of rightful presence for their students, combatting longstanding trends of deprofessionalization in the field of education. The focus of this paper is one teacher’s design of a quilt project that centers students’ family migration histories alongside research in shared history, environmental challenges, and economics of their current home island of Hawai’i. Using bidirectional artifact analysis to study the design and outcomes of the project, we found that the assignment carved spaces for students’s rightful presence in representing oft-silenced histories alongside personal interests through aesthetic expression in the sewn quilt squares. This has significance for co-fostering student and teacher rightful presence and agency concurrently.

Authors

• Deborah Fields, Utah State University

• Colby Tofel-Grehl, Teachers College, Columbia University