Collective Magic for Regenerating & Repairing Education: Black and Chicana Feminist Multimodal Story Sharing Playgrounds

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Diversity in Play in Children's Storytelling

Abstract

This conceptual paper explores regenerative educational possibilities through counterstory and testimonio sharing rooted across Black, Mexican, White, and Queer past experiences. Grounded in Black and Chicana Feminist epistemologies, our transdisciplinary approaches center multimodal and multilingual stories as data and praxis. Drawing from 15 years of collaborations, we engage in structured creative self-reflection, co-constructed expressions to address and prevent future educational harms. Our stories - spanning bilingual, STEM, arts-based contexts - reveal how translanguaging and relational pedagogies foster healing, resistance, and transformation. We conceptualize regenerative playgrounds as protective spaces for imagining social justice futures. This work affirms story sharing as a trauma informed practice with potential to repair harm, offering this framework for educational change rooted in love, justice and solidarity.

Authors

• Paty Abril-Gonzalez, University of Texas at Austin

• Zachary Rupp, University of Texas - Austin

• Tia C. Madkins, The University of Texas at Austin

• Ofelia Castro Schepers, Purdue University