Navigating Education’s Nepantla’s: How Elder Epistemologies Empowered Me in a Colonial System of Education

• In Event: Language and Literature for Healing

Abstract

Existing education research has identified a series of factors that impact student identity formation, belonging, and academic performance in secondary education. Such research focuses on one to two identity groups - like ethnicity and gender or sexuality and disability. However, very few center on the experiences of queer, disabled, students of color. Using a decolonial methodological approach to qualitative research. This auto-historia-teoría uses Chicana/indigenous epistemologies as research methodologies to identify how I, a person of multiple marginalized identities, engaged in school and how I found strength in my family, communities, and cultural practices.

Author

• Rachel Madison Torres, Wayne State University