Language and Literacy in the Borderlands: Acting upon the World through Testimonios

Saavedra discusses how children in the borderlands can inform our language and literacy practices through the Latin American literary genre known as testimonio. Drawing from the work of Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogy, I frame my experiencias with language and literacy in three different moments in my life. Through these testimonios, I make connections to the lived realities of many border crossers in the US, arguing that immigrants, border crossers, and transnational children have important lessons to teach us about language and literacy. Furthermore, testimonio continues the project of critical pedagogy through the political act of remembering, as that is also a way to reconnect language with body and consciousness in order to act upon the world. Suggestions for using testimonio in the classroom are presented

Literacy as Geographies of Transnationalism and Mobility: Diasporic Experiences, Identities, and Knowledge Production

In an increasingly mobile world, be it virtual or material, we have an incredible opportunity to conceptualize this mobility as a generator of knowledge production, giving us new ways to understand embodied literacies (Johnson & Vasudevan, 2012; Schmidt & Beucher, 2018) and ultimately reimagine our world. At some point in our lives, most of us have had to move or relocate, facing new ideas, people, and places/lands. These movimientos and migrations inevitably turn our worldview upside down, blurring our realities, a phenomenon Gloria Anzaldúa (2002, 2015) calls arrebatos (earth-shattering ruptures). Arrebatos are moments in our lives when we are catapulted into deep reflection and introspection, and have an opportunity to rethink what we believe to be true about ourselves, our culture, our worldview. Thinking of these movimientos as opportunities that produce knowledge allows us to shift our thinking about diasporic peoples of the world

Chicana/Latina Feminist Critical Qualitative Inquiry Meditations on Global Solidarity, Spirituality, and the Land

In this article we take a journey into using Chicana/Latina feminisms as one way to unearth new possibilities for critical qualitative inquiry (CQI). We start by offering a brief overview of Gloria Anzaldua’s influence on Chicana/Latina feminism, focusing on how she has inspired researching and writing from within rather than about as a decolonial turn (Keating, 2015). We then venture into new imaginaries to pose questions that would lead us to ponder about global feminista solidarity, the spirit, and the land. Our hope is that these contemplations lead us on a path of conocimiento where we can put the broken pieces of our/selves back together again

Disrupting ELL Teacher Candidates’ Identities: Indigenizing Teacher Education in One Study Abroad Program

In this article, the researchers describe and theorize the challenges and promises of exposing preservice teachers\u27 identities to indigenous, critical second language teaching experiences in one study abroad program in Mexico. The eight teacher candidates who participated in this 4-week program were predominantly white, like the majority of teachers of English language learners in the United States today. By analyzing teacher candidates\u27 self-assessments, course work samples, class discussions, focus group sessions, and ethnographic field notes, the researchers found three main themes of identity shifts: becoming socially aware, becoming empaths, and becoming creators of loving classroom spaces. These tentative changes appear to be the result of a carefully crafted curriculum, including the extracurricular activities organized in concert with the social justice language institute with whom the researchers partnered. At the same time, the teacher candidates\u27 identities worked in tensions with former identities already created, such as being excellent “classroom managers.” The researchers show these tensions and realistic hopes regarding the teacher candidates. This program—and other alternatives to preparing preservice teachers attempting to work with culturally and linguistically minoritized communities—can serve as examples of beginning efforts to decolonize curricula. This critical approach to teacher preparation creates cracks between worlds (Anzaldúa, 2002) that allow preservice teachers to rethink their identities as second language teachers in local and global contexts

Crossing Borders toward Young Transnational Lives

Young immigrant youth often live their lives across borders, either by physically crossing them for return visits and/or by metaphorically crossing them through social media and cultural identification. The authors argue these students are better understood as transnational, shifting the focus for educators away from imagining their immigrant students on a straight, one-way path to assimilation in the U.S. to understanding these youths’ abilities to cross borders. Specifically, they call for a redesignation of English Language Learners (ELLs) as Transnational English Learners (TELs). Highlighting examples of educators’ successful border-crossing work, the authors call for educators to cross borders as well in their curriculum and relationships with transnational youth

Combining Qualitative Research Perspectives and Methods for Critical Social Purposes The Neoliberal U.S. Childhood Public Policy Behemoth

This article discusses the broad-based use of bricolage to examine the neoliberal childhood policy discourses and forms of implementation that are currently practiced in the United States. Diverse, traditionally marginalized understandings such as Black feminist thought, Chicana feminism, and feminist analysis of capitalist patriarchy are combined with a Deleuze/Guattarian critique of capitalism and qualitative methods of situational analyses. We do this to identify childhood assemblages within the childhood public policy behemoth in the United States and compare these assemblages to capitalism more broadly, including how neoliberal practices are facilitated