Testimoniando Women of Color Preservice Teachers' Literacies: Reclaiming Literacies of Resistance

• In Event: (Re)Shaping Our Educational Futures Through Literacies of Resistance

Abstract

Critical literacy and language scholarship centers and re-narrativizes the testimonios–stories from the margins (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012) of communities of Color as a means of resistance and to document our existence outside of the White-heteropatriarchal gaze (Brown, 2023; Player et al., 2021; San Pedro, 2015). In teacher education research, this scholarship repositions preservice teachers of color (PSTOC) in ways that center their lived realities and validates their languages and literacies (Player et al., 2022; Rodriguez-Mojica et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2021). This paper centers the testimonios (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001) and knowings of 8 Women of Color preservice teachers (WOC PSTs) and their theorizations that emerged through plática (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) in a WOC PST collective at a Hispanic-serving Institution in the Midwest. As such, this paper asks, what do WOC testimonios reveal about their literacies?

Women of Color (WOC) feminisms collectively situate how race, gender, class, sexuality, citizenship, nationhood, settler colonialism, and white supremacy are inextricably tied to the various experiences, histories, and lived realities of WOC (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Grande, 2003; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015). Through WOC feminisms, the author employed a qualitative testimonio (Pérez Huber, 2009; The Latina Feminist Group, 2001) research approach to cultivate and examine a WOC PST collective that centers the testimonios, language and literacy practices of WOC PSTs. As methods and methodological tools to center the literacies of WOC PSTs, testimonio (Pérez Huber, 2009) and plática (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) facilitated written and oral testimonios within our WOC PST collective meetings. This study thus examines the written and oral testimonios (i.e., written reflections and interviews) that emerged within the collective meetings. The data sources produced from this study include audio recordings, field notes, analytic memos, transcripts, and oral and written testimonios (i.e., interviews). Furthermore, WOC feminisms, my Chicana feminist epistemology, and cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) provided a dynamic theoretical lens for making sense of data and reflexivity in a data analysis process (Saldaña, 2016).

This paper reveals WOC PSTs’ testimonios and expansive conceptualizations of literacies and unveils how their multimodal and multidimensional literacies are inextricably tied to their families and ways of knowing and being as WOC. Our testimonios facilitated new productions of knowledge and nudged us to recognize and reclaim the valuable knowledge, expertise, and literacies we and our families hold. In doing so, we unearthed our literacies as modes of resistance to the colonial and deficit narratives that devalue and minimize the plethora of literacies we, our families, and communities embody. WOC feminisms produce possibilities for theories of meaning-making that are expansive and reflect the ever-evolving and shifting power of our testimonios as theories for humanizing and transformational educational possibilities, allowing us to reclaim, resist, and unforget our histories. Thus, this research will illuminate the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical offerings of WOC feminisms for language arts and literacy courses across K-12 schooling and teacher education settings.

Author

• Adrianna González Ybarra, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley