A Pedagogy of Re-Membering: Participatory Action Research in an Urban Latinx Core Community

• In Event: 41.059 - PAR Entremundos: A Pedagogy of the Americas

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes of Session
The purpose of this presentation is to explore pedagogical dimensions of the Education in our Barrios Project, #BarrioEdPro. #BarrioEdProj, is a digital critical particiaptory action research (D+CPAR) collaborative that focuses on working with Latinx youth in examining the social and educational conditions that they are situated in as a means to inciting social change. I argue that the collaborative's work is a materialization of a PAR EntreMundos. I will suggest that the impact of engaging youth in archival and ethnographic research, storytelling, and social media is a transformative pedagogy that can expand our critical consciousness and push youth to re-member themselves to history, to each other, and to place, as acts of collective survivance.

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework
#BarrioEdProj braids intellectual traditions. Like cultural political economy, critical pedagogy, and Native theories, PAR entremundos is committed to engaging communities in a process of what Anzaldúa described as conocimiento (Keating, 2000), where the inner life of the mind and spirit is connected to the outer worlds of action within the struggle for social change. There is an “instructional dynamic” (Ball and Forzani 2007) in this work that emphasize processes of teaching and learning as collaborators “interpret one another and their environments over time” (p. 531).

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry
As an historical ethnographic PAR project, #BarrioEdProj was designed to provide young co-researchers to move between the field and project meetings. Co-researchers would be at local archives, conducting video recorded interviews, and engage in a variety of public events. Project meetings became spaces for both research skills development and opportunities to reflect and articulate our “felt theories” (Million, 20XX) based on the convergence of previous knowledge, our new learnings gathered from interactions with others and our emerging commitments to social change in the barrio.

Data Sources
Data included analyses of video recordings of interviews, archival material analysis, and participant observations. Project meetings had written minutes and, on some occasions, were audio recorded. Recorded data was coded and analyzed for the purposes of thinking about the impact engaging in this pedagogical approach had on young learners.

Results or Substantiated Conclusions
Findings suggest that the interconnected remaking of public education and a U.S. urban Latinx core community (barrio) takes place in the midst of the devastating trauma of what the author describes as racial neoliberal urbanism (RNU). I argue that RNU advances material, cultural and affective forms of dismemberment, where local people are dis-membered, from power, knowledge and place. I conclude by reflecting on how #BarrioEdProj might serve as a “guide for action.”

Scientific or Scholarly Contributions of the work
In this conjuncture where racial neoliberal urbanism functions as a cultural grammar that champions the disposal, containment and/or punishment of poor, people of Color, #BarrioEdProj serves as a model for effectively teaching youth and supporting a development of critically consciousness young people who will move us into the future.

Author

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College