Mapping Critical Consciousness: Young Women of Color Across Los Angeles

• In Event: Cultural Intuition as Our Guide: Co-Constructing Knowledge in the K–12 Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
As critical women of color educators, guided by our cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998), we engaged in geospatial Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) projects in order to shift our traditional teacher roles into research mentors and collaborators with our students (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Morrell, 2008). Thus, we created a geospatial YPAR high school curriculum (Pacheco & Velez, 2009) that centers the critical consciousness development of our students (Freire, 2013) by recognizing them as agentive community knowledge holders (Caraballo, et al., 2017). For this study we focus on the critical consciousness development of our young women of color YPAR students who traveled across Los Angeles to get to school, as their racial and gendered positionality directly names how to overcome injustices in our communities, in our urban journeys, and in our schools (Delgado Bernal, 2006; Lorde, 2007; hooks, 1990; Hill Collins, 1998; Gloria Anzaldua, 1987).
Theoretical Framework & Methods
This layered study focuses on how our cultural intuition, a concept central to Chicana Feminist epistemology, guided us as teachers and women of color to create a geospatial YPAR curriculum within our high school classrooms to center our students as knowledge holders and build towards critical consciousness development. We therefore discuss how we engage in a racial and spatial analysis of our communities along with our students by incorporating a Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA) framework into a YPAR high school curriculum (Velez & Solórzano, 2017; Pacheco & Velez, 2009). Building on Chicana and Black feminist thought (Anzaldua, 1987; Crenshaw, 1989; Hill Collins, 1998; Delgado Bernal, 2006; hooks, 2003; Lorde, 2007) and critical geographies (Harjo, 2019; McKittrick, 2006; Pulido, 2015), we then examine the experiences of three of our young women of color YPAR students who had to travel across the city to get to and from school. We engage in pláticas, a methodology rooted in Chicana feminist thought that breaks from traditional research interview paradigms (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016), to examine how young women of color build their critical consciousness in relationship to the landscapes they encounter along their journey to school. Finally, we use geographic information systems (GIS) to create maps merging data gathered from pláticas and YPAR document collection to map the community spaces and curricular moves related to the critical consciousness development of our collaborators across Los Angeles.
Findings and Scholarly Significance
Through this study we explore how by incorporating a CRSA (Velez & Solórzano, 2017) framework within our YPAR projects, through the use of geospatial tools, our students were able to 1) contextualize their communities from asset-based perspective (Yosso, 2014); 2) work towards critical consciousness development (Freire, 2013) and 3) racially and spatially re-imagine how oppressive conditions can be changed and transformed (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Tuck, 2008). Guided by our cultural intuition, this study contributes to the reclamation of spatial tools as pedagogical tools by teachers of color in order to learn with and from our students how the spaces and lands we inhabit and traverse allow us to problematize our realities and work towards critical consciousness development.

Authors

• Mariana E. Ramirez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Alice Im, Los Angeles Unified School District