The Act of Remembering: Testimonio as a Method to Examine a Lived Dual-Language Curriculum

• In Event: The Value of Our Words: Sustaining Radical Women of Color Epistemologies in Qualitative Educational Research

Abstract

In 2014, I embarked on a study in Guatemala that spanned two years. I examined bilingual and intercultural education in Guatemala by collecting stories from the classroom. One of the reasons I was granted permission to conduct this study in this Indigenous community was because I had a shared educational experience. The directora of the school site asked me to share my educational and linguistic journey. I shared my elementary school experience attending one of the oldest dual language programs in the midwest, Inter-American Magnet School (IAMS). My description of how my elementary school connected identity, culture, and language happened to be a goal at this specific Guatemalan school. As such, that conversation with the directora opened up the space and the community to me. After witnessing the curriculum in Guatemala, I have critically reflected on the education I experienced and received. I embarked on new research beginning with my own testimonio of my early dual language educational experience.

My testimonio was the beginning of a larger study that seeks to understand the impact a dual language education had on its students 30 years later. Inter American Magnet School was created by parent-activists (Kirk Sensesac, 2002; Potowski, 2007) in order to create a socially just curriculum that included and celebrated students with a Latin American background. The larger study explores the use of testimonio as methodology to capture school experiences. Testimonio is used as a means to “avoid essentializing a Latina experience and instead, honor the various subjectivities” (Ashmawi, Sanchez, & Carmona, 2018) that correspond with others’ identities and schooling experience. I have shared my testimonio regarding my educational journey, and have subsequently collected the stories of my younger brothers. At a later stage, I will document the stories of those from my graduating eighth grade class in order to examine how the curriculum impacted ethnic and linguistic identity. The testimonios of my brothers have helped me to interrogate not just how I perceived this language education but also how others experienced it. As such, testimonios, or the collection of stories, is the framework to understand the curriculum received as it is “grounded in lived experience” (Latina Feminist Group, 2001).

Testimonio as a methodology allows me to consider and address the following: while the curriculum was inclusive of my own Guatemalan-American identity and mirrored the linguistic practices in my home, I ask, who was left out of the curriculum? In what ways were these linguistic practices of a 50/50 Spanish/English curriculum limiting? What did my brothers and classmates think of the curriculum? Do they think of the curriculum as inclusive of their own identities? What do they remember that I do not? These are questions the collection of stories seeks to address.

Author

• Lydia A Saravia, DePaul University