Cocinar, Crear, Contar: Storytelling and Futuring in Food-related Learning Design

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Community-Based Educational Research

Abstract

This paper examines how Latine families use storytelling and food routines to reimagine everyday learning. Through community-based participatory design with multigenerational families, we explore how caregivers activate resistance, navigational, and aspirational capital to transform culturally rooted practices into educational futures grounded in agency, connection, and care. Drawing on three themes, we highlight how families share personal histories and intergenerational memories as a generative design and resistance tool through which they mobilize emotionally layered practices like cooking to design new educational futures. This work contributes to scholarship by showing how everyday cultural practices, when intentionally engaged, can serve as design materials for learning environments centered on community agency and self-determination.

Authors

• Maria Jose Anderson-Coto, UC Irvine

• Alejandra Gallegos, Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative

• Wendy Giovanna Gomez, Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative

• Kevin Crowley, University of Pittsburgh

• Andres Sebastian Bustamante, University of California - Irvine

• Diana Leyva, University of Pittsburgh