Picturing Raza Studies: Exploring Youth Literacies of Social Transformation

• In Event: 44.065 - Literacies of Social Transformation: Enacting Freirean Perspectives Across Contexts

Abstract

Objective
Secondary Ethnic Studies courses can be fertile ground for cultivating a critical meta-awareness of power relations, critical thinking and critical literacy development for Latin@ youth (Acosta, 2007, 2013; Author, 2013). This paper examines a unit in a Raza Studies high school course that employed elements of Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) to explore students’ perspectives on Raza Studies. This study asks the overarching question: How do Chicanx bilingual adolescents articulate the importance of participating in a Ethnic/Raza Studies course?

Theoretical Framework
This paper is informed by the theoretical contributions of New Literacy Studies (New London Group, 1996), critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987) and Mignolo’s (2000) “border-thinking” to examine students’ rich multimodal and multilingual practices of resistance. This framework engages a cultural and literacy borderland at the edge of home and school practices that many Chicanx students navigate in the face of social, political, and cultural tensions in their K-12 schooling (Suarez Orozco & Suarez Orozco, 2016).

Methods
This paper draws from a larger study where the mode of inquiry was ethnographic and positioned under a critical paradigm (Carspecken, 1996). Data derives from a 10-month ethnographic classroom study in California where all of the students were Chicanx, working-class, from immigrant households and bilingual. Data sources include semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and students’ Photovoice projects. Using visual techniques for data analysis (Rose, 2006), I analyzed the content of the photographs and the accompanying descriptive writings where I discovered insight about the nature of effective writing instruction and what Ethnic/Latinx Studies meant to the participating youth. Photovoice as method has deep roots in the liberationist and emancipatory philosophies of Paulo Freire (1970), and can be a means to better understand the nuances of students’ identities, consciousness, and represent their evolving understandings of the importance of Ethnic/Latinx Studies courses.

Findings
Findings demonstrate students’ robust visual, racial, and critical literacy skills. Students shared how this course cultivated notions of self-determination and their critical reading and re-writing of their social and political worlds. Furthermore, findings convey how the photovoice project allowed students to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions around hegemonic public discourses.

Scholarly Significance
This paper contributes to the expanding literature on critical pedagogies of Ethnic Studies at the secondary level (Author, 2015) and empirically supports the grassroots efforts in California to push legislation towards the expansion and sanctioning of these important and timely courses. Lastly, this paper concludes that Latinx and Ethnic Studies courses can contribute to equitable pathways to digital and connected learning, empowered literate identities, and literacies of social transformation.

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, Teachers College, Columbia University