Mapping for Social Change: Exploring the Use of Geographic Information Systems for Community-Based Organizing With Latina Immigrant Mothers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Transformational Spaces: Marginalized School Communities’ Projects of Resistance

Abstract

OBJECTIVES/PURPOSE
This paper examines how a group of Latina immigrant mothers developed expertise and utilized geographic information systems (GIS) to address concerns of educational equity. The goal of the GIS training was two-fold: 1) to build GIS-specific skills to enhance the group’s capacity to collect and analyze data to answer education-related questions, and 2) to develop a community organized research project that employs GIS to explore spatial indicators of educational (in)opportunity. This paper highlights the key pedagogical aspects that the author argues led to the development of expertise in GIS among this group of Latina immigrant mothers, how the mothers organized and developed a community-based action research project using GIS, and finally, the impact the project had for them and the community they serve.

PERSPECTIVE/THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
The use of computerized technologies known as geographic information systems (GIS), offers educational researchers an important tool for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing the relationships between schools and space. But employing GIS for social justice ends requires situating its practice within a critical theoretical frame. Toward this end, this paper borrows broadly from critical spatial theory (Lefebvre, 1991; Delaney, 2002; Soja, 1989, 1996; Peake & Kobayashi, 2002) and, more specifically, from the recent work of critical race scholars in education (Pacheco & Velez, 2009) who explore the potential of GIS for examining the spatial dimensions of race, racism, and its intersections with other forms of oppression, particularly as it relates to schools. It is this later work that frames the pedagogical approach used to develop GIS-skills among the mothers as well as the application of those skills in a community led research project.

METHODS & DATA SOURCES
Using a qualitative case study methodology, this paper addresses the following questions: 1) What pedagogical strategies are most effective for building GIS expertise among a group of Latina immigrant mothers within a social justice framework?; 2) How is GIS utilized by this same group to develop a research project?; and 3) How do the mothers perceive GIS and their abilities to engage the technology to support their efforts toward social change?

Data was collected through participant-observation over 8 months during which the training took place, as well as in-depth semi-structured interviews with the 20 mother participants.

RESULT/CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE
Findings from the study show that GIS, in conjunction with critical pedagogy, can be developed and powerfully utilized by individuals outside the academy and spaces where GIS is traditionally used. The author identified key elements of what she is calling a “grassroots spatial pedagogy” that embeds the technical training of GIS with critical race theory through an approach that is both culturally relevant and directly aimed at addressing social concerns. This study also found that as the mothers developed their GIS skills they simultaneously increased their sense as agents of social change. Although highly technical, the mothers found GIS to be a necessary tool to voice their educational concerns to an audience of school administrators and local policy-makers that often discount their stories and experiences as anecdotal and lacking evidence.

Author

• Veronica Nelly Velez, University of California - Los Angeles