Rasquache Storytelling: Collaborative Learning Through Arts and Advocacy in a Los Angeles Youth Program

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Pathways to Purpose: Examining Youth Engagment in Informal Education Environments

Abstract

Place-based education requires making intentional pedagogical links between place, political structures, and theories of change that are rooted in community knowledge. This study analyzes how teens in a place-based summer fellowship program examine the connections between different notions of place. Using ethnographic methods of observation, interviews, and focus groups, we show how storywork emerged as a pedagogical anchor through which youth learned how to make connections between art, ecology, and advocacy for their community. Drawing from the perspective of “the underdog” and Latinx immigrant community knowledge, the youth collage their stories together through rasquachismo to demonstrate both their learning and to foster change. They employ rasquachista storywork to assert community identity as a means to resist gentrification of their neighborhoods.

Authors

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Caroline Kanner, Clockshop

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles