"We Can Do Anything That We Set Our Minds To": The Schooling of Rural Mexican-Descent Students in Wyoming

• In Event: 34.062 - Constructing a Space and Place of Our Own: (Transnational) Latinas/os Navigating Educational Pathways

Abstract

As a positioned subject, this paper explores conocimiento (Mendez-Negrete, 2013) as a strategy for reclaiming family and sociocultural history in the process of documenting knowledge in our Chicana-o/Latina-o communities. This study is guided by my own retrospective memories of schooling in a rural community. As it stands, research on Mexican-descent students has been focused on urban Latinas/os in education (Michaels, 2014). Few researchers have examined rural spaces to understand the lived experiences of high school, Mexican-origin students and their relationships to teachers. For this reason, this project relies on a coming to consciousness about Wyoming rural schooling experiences among six Mexican-origin high school students from Snowy Springs High School (pseudonym). This study seeks to understand how these students’ interactions and relationships are shaped by their teacher-peer interactions in school. This research is guided by conocimiento, decolonial works with an emphasis on coloniality (Mignolo, 2000), and Chicana/Latina feminist theories (Anzaldúa, 1987), focused on lived experience, embodied knowledge, and textual analysis.

Instrumentation for the study includes a self-administered conocimiento guide distributed to six Mexican descent high school students and their ten teachers. The guide consisted of open ended statements focused on three generations of both paternal and maternal lines that interrogated their social, cultural, spiritual, educational legacies in relation to the social systems of racialized ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual inequalities, and educational inequalities. The rural high school in this study had approximately 250 students.

Upon completion of the conocimiento guide, participants were observed in the classroom for three months and extensive ethnographic field notes were recorded (Patton, 2005). An outline was used to guide the observations. Topics of observation included interactions, subject matter, community building, use of community-based teaching methods, instructional connections, classroom management, assistance to students, and cultural/gender sensitivity. The use of conocimiento as method helped participants become more aware and move into consciousness in relationship to framing their own coming to self-knowledge. This is particularly the case in relationship to notions of power that make visible those previously unseen power inequalities—especially when unpacking the ways in which conocimiento and desconocimiento inform cultural and ethnic identity and our sense of belongingness (Mendez-Negrete, 2013).

Preliminary findings show a disconnect between teacher and student relationships in the co-creation of knowledge, colonization (rooted in privilege), colonial pedagogy, and unique student and teacher identity formations. Findings also suggest that there are particular ideologies associated with rural students that deter them from applying to four-year institutions. These ideologies are associated with a perceived lack of college readiness due to being the first in their family to attend college and their perceived lack of content knowledge acquired from their rural schooling. Instead they are highly encouraged to attend a two-year institution. It is important to understand that the experiences of rural students is unlike that of their urban counterparts and even more so is the experience of Mexican-descent students.

Author

• Mariana Zaragoza, The University of Texas - San Antonio