Decolonizing Literacy Pedagogies Built From Border-Crossers’ Civic Saberes

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium delves into the 2025 theme of “Research, Remedy, and Repair” by imagining toward school-based literacy curricula that recognize and build from the critical literacy practices of border-crossing students to engage in re-making classrooms and worlds that center their expertise and concerns. Papers offer nuanced insights of how young people and families are already drawing upon important literacy practices to cross the borders of nation-states, named languages, celebrated school-based literacies, and embodied practices of civics and citizenship that are often ignored or pathologized in US classrooms. Panelists push us to shift the conversation from what students can’t do to re-imagine into existence literacy curricula built from border-crossing students’ and families’ creative interactions around written and spoken texts.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Chloe Bellows, Rutgers University

Papers

• Diasporic Dreamers: Transborder Families Soñando Futuros - Melissa Adams Corral, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley

• Learning from a Family’s Translingual Prayer and Civic Protest through Danza Azteca - Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

• The Speculative Transborder Literacies and Civic (Re)Imaginings of Elementary School Students - Chloe Bellows, Rutgers University; Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University

• From las semillas to el Arbol: Cultivating a Borderlands Biliteracies Framework - Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Enrique David Degollado, University of Iowa; Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, Arizona State University

Discussant

• Luis Urrieta, University of Texas at Austin