Teaching Testimonio: Connecting Theory to Practice in Gender and Education Research

• In Event: Constructing and deconstructing gender in social and educational contexts

Proposal

In her book, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge writes:
"I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me..." (p. 202).

A similar call to action to deconstruct existing structural power imbalances appears in the proposal submission guidelines for the CIES 2020 Gender and Education Committee. This call for proposals asks gender and education researchers to give presentations that create discussion around the ways in which educational research perspectives and resulting polices can be more gender equitable and inclusive. The call urges researchers to connect gender biases with other forms of social discrimination in asking research questions and in responding to them. My doctoral dissertation does just that: in applying feminist standpoint theory and community cultural wealth to present five underrepresented minority and first-generation women graduate students’ testimonios, the findings show how assets from the women’s intersecting marginalized identities contributed to their gaining access to and navigating through their graduate STEM degree programs. These women’s testimonios provide a counternarrative, in their own voices, to the prevailing deficit lens with which education literature views them and highlights the ways in which the assets from the women’s community cultural wealth, although overlooked by their graduate institution, are instrumental to their success. In addition, the women also share their perceptions of institutional resources and services available to them and evaluate their utility in supporting them.

The women’s narratives are testimonios to their experiences as underrepresented minority and first-generation women graduate students in STEM fields. Although literature has been written on women’s experiences and the gender bias that they encounter in STEM academic disciplines and fields of work, Williams, Phillips, and Hall (2014) explain that more research is necessary because “the current body of social psychological work on gender bias has focused almost exclusively on the experiences of White women” (p.4). Furthermore, the work that has been written on women of color in STEM highlights their “otherness” from both white women and men instead of focusing on sharing the variance in women’s unique identities, assets, and challenges, which constitute women’s collective experiences in STEM. The testimonios from the women participants in my dissertation study not only reconstruct the cannon of literature on women in STEM by providing a counternarrative to the deficit literature on underrepresented minority and first-generation women students in STEM fields but also provide justification for re-envisioning institutional support so that it more adequately responds to the differentiated needs of women graduate students in STEM.

Testimonio emerged out of resistance to the lack of inclusion of other voices, experiences, narratives, and knowledge and functions as a counternarrative to mainstream, privileged discourse. By highlighting these women’s testimonios, this presentation provides concrete examples of various ways in which testimonio as a research method is both well-suited for social justice-oriented gender and education research and can, as Huber (2009b) contends, “disrupt the apartheid of knowledge in academia, moving toward educational research guided by racial and social justice for Communities of Color” (Huber, 2009b, p. 640). Although testimonio in the American education tradition emerged from Chicana/Latin American feminist critical pedagogy studies and scholarship (Arcilla, 2008; Espino,Vega, Rendón, Ranero, & Muñiz, 2012; Huber 2009a; The Latina Feminist Group, 2001), this presentation shows that no monopoly exists on theory, methodology, or terminology and argues that a broader application of testimonio in gender and education research will help to incorporate intersectional approaches into research design, policy, and practice.

This presentation outlines the important tenets of testimonio and explains why certain characteristics differentiate testimonio from other qualitative methods or data. These characteristics, according to de Saxe (2012), include the fact that testimonios should incorporate the voice(s) of the marginalized without essentializing or generalizing, should foster solidarity between the speaker(s) and reader(s), and encourage both social change and social justice. Referencing the unique components of testimonio, this presentation highlights parallels between testimonios provided by the first-generation women graduate students in STEM fields in my doctoral dissertation study and international examples (both seminal works and emerging scholarship) to illustrate the ways in which women all over the world use testimonio to document both individual and collective experiences of marginalization. Through the documentation of their experiences, women exercise agency in using their own voices to write counternarratives to the official dialogue (or lack of dialogue entirely) about the social and political injustices that they experience.

This presentation concludes with the suggestion that a broader application of testimonio to gender and education research will facilitate women’s participatory knowledge production and can, in applying Eddo-Lodge’s words, “deconstruct the structural power of a system” that simply characterizes women and their educational experiences “as different” (p. 202).




Works Cited:

Eddo-Lodge, R. (2018). Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Huber, L. P. (2009b). Disrupting apartheid of knowledge: Testimonio as methodology in Latina/o critical race research in education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(6), 639-654.

Williams, J., Phillips, K. W., & Hall, E. V. (2014). Double jeopardy? Gender bias against women of color in science. Hastings College of the Law, Center for WorkLife Law. Retrieved from www.worklifelaw.org/publication/double-jeopardy-gender-bias-against-women-of-color-in-science/

Author

• Lauren DeCrosta, George Washington University