ABSTRACT. STEM education and practice should be “visibly and ideologically reflective of diversity”, and in this vision we should all consider who is marginalized and the barriers that help maintain marginalized communities (Adams, 2020, p.457). Service-learning pedagogy with STEM is an underexplored pedagogical strategy which can connect pre-service teachers with community-based organizations. This session will detail two different service-learning experiences used with pre-service teachers, and the incorporation of bilingual STEM tools and manipulatives. This discussion will also discuss the benefits of using service-learning events for discrepant event STEM demonstrations and especially bilingual populations from a novice bilingual elementary teacher.

ABSTRACT. This paper reviews and seeks to understand how antiracism is being defined within the field of secondary (6-12) literacy education at this moment. Rather than a simple review of definitions, I have chosen to review and analyze within Melamed’s (2011) theory of official antiracisms––specifically neoliberal multiculturalism––and radical antiracisms, which I unpack further in my theoretical framework. At the onset of my review, I suspected that some current understandings of antiracism might fall within neoliberal multiculturalism, while others would, hopefully, be what Melamed calls “a new materialist antiracism––a radically antiracist materialism” (p. 50). Based on my previous research and scholarship, I believe that culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings, 1995), a theory that has become conflated with antiracism work in education, has become more neoliberal than radical––so I examine the literature for use of CRP and how it is applied within antiracist literacy frameworks. Alternately, abolitionist pedagogy (Rodríguez, 2010) and abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019; Love & Muhammad, 2020) have emerged through my research as radical antiracisms, so I look at whether and how they show up in the literature. Prior to reviewing and analyzing the literature I examine my researcher stance and positionality as a white woman within the context of liberatory literacy praxis. I conclude my paper by considering the implications of how antiracism is being defined within 6-12 literacy education, as well as the incommensurabilities (Tuck & Yang, 2012) I continue to grapple with as I engage with this work.

ABSTRACT. During this presentation, I will discuss the importance of transforming the curriculum to include culturally relevant contexts that foster linguistic skills. Many students feel pressured by the school system to assimilate into the monolingual curriculum. However, educators can utilize effective educational practices to help students produce beautiful stories that promote their experiences. A culturally sustaining pedagogy can focus on culture, race, and ethnicity while creating spaces to validate identities and effectively meet all students' educational needs. Supporting and nurturing educators’ practices for success and achievement should be effective and efficient. Through critical thinking, educators can promote social justice.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, the linguistic dilemma facing Head Start teachers is presented. These teachers stand between contradictory policies: English-Only and Honoring children’s mother languages. While a classroom in Arizona, an English-Only state, Head Start holds a federal policy of honoring children’s home languages. Logically, the Head Start program is under federal policy, separated from K-12. However, Head Start is also supposed to prepare children ready for K-12 education. Naturally, the English-Only policy heavily affects Head Start teachers’ daily practices. Drawn from video data and interviews, the teachers’ struggle is reported to discuss the appropriate multilingual practice for young children.

ABSTRACT. Practitioners and scholars in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) often recognize inequities that they nonetheless struggle to remedy, leading to frustratingly circular discussions about achievement gaps and subtractive schooling that continue decade after decade. We argue that authentic approaches to equity in DLBE settings must raise critical consciousness, and therefore DLBE professional development must transcend the outdated, un-critical, pre-packaged, and traditionally defined spaces and systems for “teacher training”. In this paper, we draw on three qualitative studies to identify new ways to conceptualize “professional development” for DLBE educators that centers and promotes critical consciousness.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the experiences of a rural teacher in a Midwestern elementary school. Using Swanson’s Middle Range Theory of Caring (1991, 1993), the author sought to make meaning of how the participant worked with immigrant students, specifically undocumented Latinx students, through an ethic of care. As tensions emerged from classroom-based observations and interviews, the author chose to draw upon Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a way of examining how racism operates within educational spaces. Guided by narrative form, through the description (telling) and reflection (retelling), the author makes meaning of racial biases, microaggressions, and the exclusion of undocumented students.

ABSTRACT. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, this study documents the professional, cultural, and linguistic experiences and perspectives of teacher educators, experienced and novice teachers, school administrators, community activists, and teacher candidates regarding learning to teach as well as effective and contextualized practices, strategies, stances, and dispositions for teaching and learning. Ultimately, it strives to bridge community, school, and university cultures through creating a community-generated, durable body of knowledge able to inform the ongoing transformation of the local borderland university’s educator preparation program (EPP), and by implication, teacher preparation in borderlands contexts and beyond. Closely related to this outcome is the strengthening of collaborative partnerships between the EPP, schools, and the community.

ABSTRACT. This symposium opens an inter-epistemic dialogue with decolonial studies in Latin America (LA) to refuse the erasure of Indigenous, Black, and Mestizx thought situated outside of the anglosphere. It promotes intercultural translation to intersect concepts enunciated from diverse spaces, places, territories, bodies, and sites of resistance in LA that assist in the reconceptualization/resignification of curriculum and pedagogy. Translation is conceived as a transgressive dialogic act of betrayal against dominant interpretive frameworks. This symposium weaves an ethically/politically entangled network of scholars and intellectual activists from diverse geographies of reason (Gordon, 2011) to contribute conceptually to decolonial studies in education. Ultimately, it intends to open an inter-epistemic space that will foster an ecology of decolonial knowledges and practices.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study is to begin to investigate the feelings of isolation of a dyslexia teacher through the interview transcripts and document analysis evidence. It addresses the following questions: How can we improve the interaction or communication between regular classroom teachers and dyslexia teachers, so that dyslexia teachers are not feeling isolation? How can we effectively demonstrate to regular classroom teachers that the instruction in the dyslexia lab will improve students’ scores in the standardized test? To better understand the experiences, we draw on the conceptual framework of teacher isolation through theoretical perspectives. The conceptual frameworks guiding this study were teacher isolation and the new reform. As noted by Flinder (1988) in defining isolation, two different orientations exist. The first one views isolation as the conditions in which teachers work i.e., the characteristics of the teacher’s workplace and the opportunities, or lack of opportunities, the teacher has for interacting with colleagues. The second orientation locates the workplace inside the individual as it is created and continually recreated through the filtering and processing of information (Flinder, 1988). In addition, to Flinder, Shaywitz (2003) helps us understand how a substantial number of well-intentioned boys and girls—including bright ones—experience significant difficulty in learning to read, through no fault of their own. Shaywitz (2003) emphasizes how “this frustrating and persistent problem in learning to read is called dyslexia” (p. 3). For this reason, the dyslexia teacher should be included in a child’s education. Via the lens of the conceptual framework mentioned above, we draw upon qualitative research through an autoethnography. Saldaña (2011) states that this genre gives its writer intimate knowledge of what it takes for a participant to look inward to openly reveal personal experiences to others. Autoethnography studies personal and past experiences in a systematic way to understand and analyze culture: “Autoethnographers recognize the innumerable ways personal experience influence the research process” (Ellis et al., 2011, p.274).For data analysis, perspectives through journal entries were analyzed, a semi-structured interview by a peer was conducted, informal conversations with a dyslexia teacher who shares the lab were analyzed, and document analysis was used as evidence. To analyze the interview, the process of open coding was used. Each passage of the interview was read and reread to develop categories and to label them with the most appropriate codes (Boeije, 2002). The key themes that emerged from the data analysis were teacher isolation and work not being appreciated because of high stakes of standardized testing. Individuals working in the same environment or culture should be able to establish some sort of interaction. As living organisms, educational organizations influence many factors (Öntaş, 2019) and one of them is to have an understanding that we are a group of people bound together (Heider, 2005). Teachers become a magnet for others, as understood by Heider (2005) “who seek environments in which they can learn from their colleagues and create success for their students” (p.5). If dyslexia teachers are included and considered in their students’ education, success will be immediately visible in their mainstreamed classroom. Regular classroom teachers need to work side-by-side with the dyslexia teachers so students can be successful in the classroom and in the standardized test.

References

Boeije, H. (2002). A purposeful approach to the constant comparative method in the analysis of qualitative interviews. Quality and quantity, 36(4), 391-409.

Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: an overview. Historical Social Research/Historic Sozialforschung, 12(1), 273–290. https://doi.org/http://www.jstor.org/stable/23032294

Flinders, D. J. (1988). Teacher isolation and the new reform. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 4(1), 17-29.

Heider, K. L. (2005). Teacher isolation: How mentoring programs can help. Current Issues in Education, 8. https://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/1686/725

Öntaş, T. (2019) "Teacher socialization and teacher isolation. In Examining the Teacher Induction Process in Contemporary Education Systems. IGI Global, 2019. 188-211.

Saldaña, J. (2011). Fundamentals of qualitative research: Understanding qualitative research. Oxford.

Shaywitz, S. E. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. Vintage.

ABSTRACT. In this study, I analyze preservice teachers of color’s complex and complicated learning practice in a teacher education program in Midwest U.S., focusing on the cultural perspective of inyeon. Two stories featuring a character named Francisco will introduce the audience to discussions about what various causes and connections reveal in an educational space. I argue that all people maintain direct and indirect connections with social and historical issues, even if they do not recognize that they have these relationships. I also aim to capture the multiple possibilities and factors that existed and played a role in the collaboration.

ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 pandemic saw millions of people facing uncertain access to food due to lockdowns. The supply was there, but the missing middle market or short supply chains forced farmers across the nation to discard produce. Educational communities are utilizing design thinking to explore ways to eliminate waste and improve processes in order to better serve all with food in the future.

ABSTRACT. This manuscript report on a study of how preservice teachers connect with ideas about equity, social justice, and diversity in online spaces. As an exploratory investigation, this study combined an initial survey and interviews of preservice teachers to examine how they connected with equity-oriented ideas and each other through social media. Documentation of social media data was also collected for focal participants. Preliminary analysis reveals a variety of platforms and formats are used, but for differing purposes and that participant activity crosses over between online and real life spaces.

ABSTRACT. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the socioeconomic and political crisis in Latin American intensified, and the number of refugees from Venezuela, Haiti, and others countries increased considerably. Based on this issue, this presentation examines the current Brazilian socioeconomic and political crisis and the impacts on refugee children and families. In this study, we use Critical Race Theory (CRT) and border theory lens to understand how the intersectionality of racism, language, ethnicity, sexism, classism, gender, sexuality, and other forms of oppression impact the experiences of refugees children and families. This presentation will analyze the current government policies and how this political crisis impacts children's access to public schools and other services. In this presentation, we will have Brazilian immigration lawyers, researchers, and activists sharing their empirical experiences with children and families. We will also have a Senegalese refugee educator sharing his story as a refugee in Brazil. The presentation will be in Portuguese with English translation.

ABSTRACT. Our panel emerges from the research of three members of the Aztlán Study Group, a study group dedicated to mutual support in learning, teaching, and research as related critical-curricular pedagogical praxis in Aztlán, Gran México. Critical curricular-pedagogical praxis, by definition, refers to critical pedagogy specifically elaborated within specific bioregions and leveraged toward collective conscientization (Freire, 1970/1998; Paraskeva, 2016, 2020).

This panel particularly explores possible deployments of testimonio as critical-curricular pedagogical praxis in our region. Within our context, testimonio research’s embattled definition emphasizes testimonio as both a politically-charged research method and transnational Global South critical intellectual production (Organizer et al.). Following Beverly’s (1987) definition, we define testimonio as social or literary production that (a) provides a first-person narrative, (b) recounts personal-social-historical experiences, (c) develops political aims, (d) represents, at times, the narration of semi- or illiterate narrators, (e) involves recording-translation-transcription, (f) and creates and seeks to sustain conscientization via author- and readership. Overall, we understand our deployments of testimonio in our panel as examples of transnational critical curricular-pedagogical praxis (Yúdice, 1993, 1994) Testimonio research in education is one area that begins, however tentatively, to push beyond Statesian and Anglophone bounds in education research, and in doing so, it suggests vast decolonizing traditions of educational and cultural criticism not fully recognized nor understood in US educational contexts. Valuing decolonial traditions, our panel explores testimonios of unaccompanied minors in educational settings, Chicana graduate students conscientization narratives and self-learning through testimonio, and classroom uses of testimonio as source of “voice” for dual enrollment high school students. Following exemplary uses of testimonio (Barrios de Chungara & Viezzer, 1978; Menchú & Burgos, 1983), each deployment of testimonio in our panel drives are recovering critical content and language resources removed in the epistemicide of subtractive schooling (Paraskeva, 2016, Valenzuela, 1999). Overall, the purpose of testimonio research advanced in this panel is to first narrativize and, by doing so, humanize transnational lives, languages, learning, and teaching.

Presenter 1 Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors’ Education in Government Shelters

This presentation addresses the lived curriculum of immigration experienced by unaccompanied immigrant minors while they are located at the government shelters upon arrival to the USA. Drawing on the difficulties immigrant children face in schools, the questions that arise are: Are teachers prepared to deal with these populations? Are these children taught taking into consideration their original language and culture? Are their funds of knowledge being valued? While there’s research related to immigrant minors’ education, there is no research devoted to the analysis of child detainee experiences and scant attention paid to the curricular aims of this education as they are inside the government shelters. This paper is located within the framework of testimonio and its results are in progress since in my personal experience the education delivered to these children lacks the intention of maintaining their language and cultural heritage, so I ask if the curriculum considers both?

Presenter 2 Reclaiming Identity: Testimoñios of Latinas at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

This paper focuses on the testimoñios of five graduate Latinas from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Testimoñio as a research tool disrupts traditional education so that the individual reclaims identity and power. As Anzaldúa contested, distorted histories create an us vs. them mentality. Thus, testimoñio becomes a way in which to topple the hierarchy and unmask the hegemony of education. It validates cultural knowledge, is subjective, politically grounded, and relates sociohistorical situations to the human experience. Accordingly, this research centers on new interpretations, experiences in higher education, and inspires transformative paradigms that contest interlocking systems of power. As a counternarrative, it challenges majoritarian stories rooted in Eurocentrism, offering a safe space for urgent stories to be heard. Like this, it humanizes these experiences, while conveying an epistemology of truth.

Presenter 3 Intersectionality, Liminal Space: A Teacher’s Testimonio using Testimonios in a Writing College Class

Decolonization is a delinking of the colonized curriculum in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of testimonio in a freshman, writing college class through my own testimonio and how this praxis is empowering not only myself but my students, too. Anzaldua’s autohistoria of self-knowledge provides the theoretical framework. My testimonio offers an intersectional space as a practitioner, as a student, as a Latina, and as a person of color. It is creating a critical consciousness that disrupts educators and students alike. While my study using the testimonio in my classroom is still emerging, I offer a preliminary account in this paper. The use of the testimonio directly in the classroom offers an opportunity for further research by educators, education research, and teacher preparation as a form of delinking colonized curriculum.

References

Beverly, J. (1987). Anatomía del testimonio. Revista Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 13(25), 7–16.

Barrios de Chúngara, D. & Viezzer, M. (1978). Let me speak! Testimony of a woman in the Bolivian mines (Trans.V. Ortiz). Monthly Review Press.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogía del oprimido. Siglo Vientiuno Editores. (Original work published 1970)

Menchú, R. & Burgos, E. (1985). Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Siglo Veintiuno Editores.

Paraskeva, J. M. (2016). Curriculum epistemicide: Toward an itinerant curriculum theory. Routledge.

Paraskeva, J. M. (2020). Curriculum and the generation of utopia. Routledge.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. SUNY Press.

Yúdice, G. (1991). Testimonio and postmodernism. Latin American Perspectives, 18(3), 15–31.

Yúdice, G. (1992). Testimonio y concientización. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 18(36), 207–227.

ABSTRACT. Traditional science classrooms are often seen as bias-free, apolitical spaces guided by rote memorization of discrete facts despite contradicting historical factors (Atwater, 2010, Barder, 2019; Somerville, 1994; Wellerstein, 2019, Yakushko, 2019). This presentation describes a scenario in which an instructor and their students worked to formulate an evidence-based argument to encourage two biological supply companies to change the labeling of a human skin microscope slide from a scientifically inaccurate term rooted in racism to a scientifically accurate label (Agyemang, et al., 2005, Takezawa, 2015, Weizmann, et al., 1996). The social actions of the instructor and students led to a positive outcome, thereby challenging the notion of science as an apolitical space while still allowing students to learn the scientific content.

ABSTRACT. While a large body of literature exists on the role of scholar activism at the faculty/staff level, there is less conversation on the role of students as scholar activists. This paper will discuss the development of a scholar activism course, designed to create opportunities for students to use their research as a form of activism. The following questions serve as guideposts for the curriculum development: Who are the students who want to engage in scholarly activist work? What role do academic courses have in preparing students for scholarly activist work? How can instructors support the development of scholarly activists?

ABSTRACT. In Spring 2021, we invited a group of preservice teachers to join a book club reading memoirs of social justice activists. The themes of activism included racial justice, disability rights, journalism about class experiences, and LGBTQIA+ visibility. In eight sessions over four months, the group of 5 preservice teachers, one paraprofessional, and two professors ranging in age from 19 to 43 and from enrollment in early childhood, middle childhood, adolescent education and intervention specialist preparation programs from two Midwestern universities, met to talk about the books and ourselves.

ABSTRACT. In 1949, the eighth education reform, which is the New Curriculum Reform (NCR), was introduced. Since the economic reforms and the open-door policy began in the late 1970s, education policy has been undergoing a huge transformation. This paper examines the way of China’s curriculum reform localization and the deimpiralization, decolonization, and de-cold war of China’s curriculum. It is hoped that more and more teachers can have a better understanding of that we are in a global environment and inspired them to transition away from the traditional ways with the principle of global vision and local action.

ABSTRACT. I repeatedly pose two main questions to future educators: “What are schools for?” and “What is this course for?” Then, we blur the lines between students and teachers to co-create our syllabus based on School of Education objectives and our own aims. I will share this process from the summer development of the course syllabus, as well as our reflections as we made sense of: our understandings and aims within the wider curriculum of our current place and time and our hopes for our collective future.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I adopt a decolonial perspective to understand institutional changes and analyze the extent to which the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) perpetuates coloniality. I intersect local transformations within a modern/colonial world-systems framework to situate the UNAH beyond political-economic paradigms that refuse to depart from the nation-state as the central unit of analysis (Grosfoguel, 2007). Here, we are dealing with the subjective as well as the intersubjective, that is, the socio-cultural, political, and epistemological dimensions of the university and the global entanglements these dimensions manifest. By examining higher education’s curriculum through a broader modern/colonial framework, I point to the ways the curriculum at UNAH sustains the geopolitics and coloniality of knowledge, power, and being.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, two teacher educators share their self-study and analysis of their course assignments using a lens focused on a set of humanizing ethics. We focused our analysis on the following four pillars of learning and teaching: creativity, collectivism, care, and critical reflection. Our findings reveal how our work has bumped up against a rigid system of licensure requirements and accountability, but also how we have tried to resist this inflexibility, working to create more liberatory, caring, and collective spaces for our students to make meaning as they define their own pedagogical stances.

ABSTRACT. Although the Covid Pandemic has highlighted educational inequities, for pre-service general educators at a large midwestern university, it created opportunity. For the first time, instruction in classroom management, traditionally only part of the preservice special educator program, was made available to all undergraduates through online, asynchronous learning modules. The success of the course, as measured by student feedback and learning, has led to extension of the opportunity. The course design and content are grounded in the creation of equitable communities of learning that are proactive and that practice ongoing mitigation of social, learning, and developmental challenges.

ABSTRACT. The looking-glass school seems implicated in the expression and production of microfascist desires. The antifascist counterschool can neither fully relinquish its designs on students nor directly confront it with an opposing force, but must escape this binary trap through reparative affective replacement, potentially through playful study. Playful study, as a profane, queer use of schooling practices as toys for attention, might create spaces of experimentation and different becoming. This presentation maps this general sociopolitical-theoretical territory and explores specifically a potential playfully studious praxis in Japanese university English language teaching.

ABSTRACT. This session will look at contemporary efforts at ensuring the ignorance of US citizens through various political efforts at education for ignorance. Some contemporary efforts toward erasing Martin Luther King Jr. from social studies textbooks and civil rights leaders from language arts will be explored alongside some less commonly understood example related to, for example, lack of interest or will to know. This session will reframe ignorance not as a lack of knowledge but as something cultivated and maintained and as a by-product of knowledge production. This session will end with a call for ignorance studies in curriculum studies.

ABSTRACT. Following the murders of unarmed Black people by police, white people participated in interviews and focus groups where they were asked to tell stories and grapple with how those stories contributed to their understanding of their racialized identities. Using critical whiteness as a theoretical lens, our preliminary findings demonstrate how the white participants wanted to talk about race and engaged in scapegoating of other white people. We theorize, that their scapegoating was an attempt at forming a new white community that would be separate from the white community they feared losing if they were to talk directly about social justice.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, this systematic literature review looks at 1) critical whiteness pedagogical strategies with teachers and/or students and 2) key findings across the included studies. Pedagogical findings suggest that a combination of strategies and curricular materials lead to some promising practices, and that sustained inquiry may lead teachers and students toward actionable steps in dismantling white supremacy. Key findings across the studies point toward the importance of building relationships, grounding identity work in historical and systemic structures, handling emotions constructively, and balancing risks and costs with sustainable practices and supportive communities.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I address the current mental health crisis in the American education system through the lens of teacher education. While recent scholars and educational bodies alike have profanely illuminated (Benjamin, 1929) the mental health crisis into something now seen as extraordinary, I contend that the crisis was already surreal and paradoxically, that the surreal has long been the reality. By addressing teacher education’s propensity to marginalize this population through a hidden curriculum, I argue that current teacher preparation programming dismisses both the prevalence and relevance of students living with mental illness—a prevalence and relevance only exacerbated by, not originating from, the COVID pandemic. I will provide a brief survey of literature surrounding the current state of current teacher education programming, identify where a hidden curriculum exists, and address the implications of this hidden curriculum for students living with mental illness.

ABSTRACT. Through a document analysis of the Teaching Performance Expectations (TPEs) in California, this project explored how the TPEs address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The analysis is theoretically informed by critical race theory and critical whiteness studies and critical policy analysis. While there is plenty of evidence in the TPEs that indicates attention to DEI, there is no mention of how education systems are organized by white supremacy. Without the explicit acknowledgment of the ways whiteness is structurally woven into our education systems, whiteness is reified as the default and norm, thwarting efforts at transformation in teacher education.

ABSTRACT. In this study, I invite the audience to engage in the process of discovering and naming multiple desires in a teacher education space. Based on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of desire, I consider desire as potential and possibility. Two stories pivoted on Choua will introduce the reader to the discussion of multiple desires. Specifically, what I intend in this study is a twofold process: first, looking at desires as generative forces and flows. Second, finding and discovering multiple desires in this space and naming them.

ABSTRACT. Writing is a critical aspect of literacy and communication. However, many elementary teacher preparation programs across the United States do not offer stand-alone writing methods. A solution to help in-service teachers develop writing content and pedagogy is to participate in high-quality professional development like the National Writing Project. This work utilizes complexity theory and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to explore how elementary teachers make sense of their National Writing project experience. As the educational world continues to steep in standardization and prescription, findings will reveal what happens when teachers are treated as professionals and valued for their expertise in NWP experiences.

ABSTRACT. This paper weaves a personal, 23-year narrative of social science education with key concepts in ontology and epistemology. It features historical events along the way, including the coronavirus pandemic, that have shaped the author’s personal reflections about the role of various kinds of data, stories, and questions shaping public policy and collective consciousness about what it means to live safely in a democratic society. The implications for practitioners are a mini-lesson on critical realism and a call for dismantling the false dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative inquiry for the sake of doing antiracist research across academic silos and disciplinary divides.

ABSTRACT. This conceptual paper examines the relationship between racism, propaganda, and curriculum. The articulation of racism, propaganda, and curriculum within and beyond schools is conceptualized as the coloniality of curriculum. The latter is understood as an imperial/colonial doctrine insofar as it is conceived as a pedagogical mode of imperial domination aimed at colonial domesticity. Conceptualizing the relationship between racism, propaganda, and curriculum in such a way contributes to understanding the complex ways the hegemonic curriculum propagates and articulates an imperial/colonial sense of being indifferent toward the suffering of colonized and racialized others. This concept enables the reading and interpretation of academic, educational, and curricular discourses that reproduce Euro-American ways of being (ontological violence) and individualist ways of knowing (epistemic violence).

ABSTRACT. Through Pinar’s theory of the Psychoanalytic Process of Repression, this paper critiques the curricular application of the First Amendment as undemocratic and detrimental to student identity, as it denies cultural coherence, specifically silencing non-western funds of knowledge, and facilitates a type of cognitive dissonance that disrupts student engagement and persistence in school (Author, 2020; Darder, 2019; Deloria & Wildcat, 200; Malott, 2007; Nelson, 2013; Pinar et al., 2008; Ragosta, 2014).

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this qualitative research is to examine my experiences as an immigrant student and as a curriculum administrator in introducing a culturally relevant curriculum on my campus. The questions are: How can educators on the borderlands use testimonios to decolonize the curriculum? How can educators create a program of study or curriculum where academic achievement and cultural competence merge? My framework is based on Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of Nepantla. This research draws from testimonio inquiry exploring my living curriculum as an emerging scholar and curriculum administrator of students who live in historically marginalized areas. More specifically, I use testimonios method of inquiry to critically explore my work to transform a curriculum designed by white supremacy into a more relevant curriculum that will support students’ academic achievement. Immigrants have “una herida abierta” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 25) que todavía sangra y duele (that still bleeds and hurts) because living in the borderlands, means that you are a witness of the immigrants’ struggles when they cross the river. As an immigrant student and educator, I experienced hidden discrimination in education. Testimonio method of inquiry will help me to explain how place-base education will support students’ academic achievement. I will place myself as the main participant. My personal lived experiences as an immigrant student and professional experiences are shared via testimonio to unveil the struggles and injustices in education. In this research, Five teachers/participants who have similar experiences with me shared their testimonios. The data will be collected from personal writings, journals, previous class reflections, interviews. I will read all the documents, testimonios, transcriptions several times and will look for codes. “These codes function as a way or pattering, classifying and later organizing each datum into emergent categories for analysis” (Saldaña, 2011, p. 95). My argument is that the students who were taught with a culturally relevant curriculum excelled in academics. As an educator who lives in the borderland, I see the need to transform the traditional curriculum into a more culturally relevant curriculum to support immigrant students in their learning. This research is important because I will generate a change in education that will liberate the oppressed from the oppressor.

ABSTRACT. After the pandemic, our curriculum and instructional technology positions propelled us to propose a new way of thinking about curriculum for the digital age. We asked ourselves what the curriculum of the future might look like. Through initial analysis of our lived experiences, we pondered how curriculum concepts taught in virtual spaces did not capture the attention of practitioners and did not emphasize “learning” but instead focused on survival during the pandemic. We consider the possibility that the curriculum of the digital age could “become” fluid and grounded in the lived experiences of its practitioners.

ABSTRACT. Critical media scholars have increasingly called for the examination of online practices that perforate the boundaries of in and out of school contexts. In response, I use this paper to examine shitposting, a discursive practice within social media contexts that I position as a tool for public pedagogy. I achieve this by, first, redefining shitposting through extant research on the topic and, second, placing shitposting within Burnett & Merchant’s model for critical analysis within social media. In doing so, I argue that shitposting holds the potential (but often fails) to contribute to the democratic aims of critical digital media literacy.

ABSTRACT. Critics often deride people who believe in and spread conspiracy theories for being illogical and lacking “critical thinking” skills. However, analysis of the QAnon movement reveals that many of the processes current QAnon adherents use to interpret media and politics mirror approaches taken by critical academics, creating a litany of “upside-down” theoretical moves. This homology renders common intellectual approaches to analyzing conspiracy theory potentially useless and necessitates more nuanced forms of critique and resistance to address the seemingly ubiquitous conspiratorial thought that pervades contemporary political culture. We thus argue that the frequent calls for educators to employ “critical thinking” to combat conspiracy theories need to be radically reconsidered for a post-truth public.

ABSTRACT. This presentation juxtaposes the narratives of 3 emerging scholars teaching, learning, and living in the Rio Grande Valley with the fictionalized account of Rio Grande Valley-bred scholar, noted scholar, and the Mexican American Studies pioneer Americo Paredes in his novel George Washington Gomez (1990).  Taking a narrative approach, this paper offers and critically explores three autoethnographic accounts from the authors alongside key critiques of the anglicized curriculum in Paredes (1990) as well as other contemporary curricular critiques from proponents of culturally sustainability (Aim, Paris & Wong, 2020; Paris, 2012). In so doing, we hope to highlight connections and contradictions among identity, culture, and curriculum in ways that deepen our understanding of culturally sustaining curricular practice.

ABSTRACT. Grounded in Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), I analyze how CNN approaches Latinx immigrants’ families on the border of the United States and Mexico, primarily undocumented children and women, and how those stereotypes impact the experiences, opportunities, and emotions of K-12 Latinx students and families in the U.S. public schools. I use frame analysis as a methodological approach to understanding the ways CNN frames Trump’s rhetoric through the stories of the “zero-tolerance” policy and separation of immigrant children from their families on the border of the U.S. and Mexico border.

ABSTRACT. Scaffolded on existentialism, this study dissects my joys, estrangements, uncertainties as complex circumstantial agreements with societal and educational language-related antinomies. I use currere narrative sequencing to biograph but also critically reflect on the psychological and academic effects of linguistic multicompetence as a curriculum student. This work can inform curricular practices concerned with guaranteeing minority/immigrant’s academic/life success in mainstream America while ensuring sustainable languaging traditions.

ABSTRACT. The intersection of critical consciousness and dual language bilingual education (DLBE) is the focus of the present paper. It is based on a case study exploring how DLBE educators understand, operationalize, and acquire their perceptions and tools to teach for and with critical consciousness, especially in relation to students labeled “emergent bilinguals” or “native Spanish speakers”. Valenzuela (2016) argues that critical consciousness is key when working with Latinx youth and Cervantes-Soon (2014) calls for more scholarly attention to critical consciousness in DLBE; this study addresses this call. Insights from seven participant interviews will be useful to practitioners and scholars alike.

ABSTRACT. Our panel emerges from the research of members of the Aztlán Study Group (ASG), a study group dedicated to mutual support in learning, teaching, and research as related to critical studies of Aztlán, Gran México. One area of research focus of the ASG is critical pedagogies of place, with special emphasis on critical pedagogies of place in the RGV. Each of the presenters in this panel will critically engage in Aztlan in their research. Having two dimensions, critical pedagogies of place analyze the conditions of subtractive schooling’s epistemicide as exemplified in Presenter 1 as well as regional self-defense strategies with particular transferable relevance to other regions as exemplified in presenters 2, 3, and 4.

Inherent in this critical place-based pedagogies, is the notion of critical curricular pedagogical praxis. Critical curricular-pedagogical praxis, by definition, refers to critical pedagogy specifically elaborated within specific bioregions and leveraged toward collective conscientization. Consciously adopting the term critical pedagogies of place (Gruenwald, 2003a, 2003b), our project draws directly on the Guajardo brothers’ Llano Grande Project (e.g. Guajardo, 1997; Guajardo et al., 2006; Guajardo, 2007; Guajardo & Guajardo, 2002; Guajardo, Guajardo, Oliver, & Keawe, 2012). Organized specifically around the critical understandings of Aztlán’s values, traditions, and resources, the Guajardo brothers’ project provides us with an example of both critical regional understandings and successful implementation of critical place-based pedagogies. Starting in the 1990s and continuing to date, the Guajardo brothers’ project insists that authentic learning and teaching be relevant to regional collective community concerns, along with participants’ personal narratives.

Importantly, the Guajardo brothers’ project insists on cultural and linguistic sustainability as integrated into notions of community development. This focus on community development emphasizes identifying and resisting colonial knowledge projects inherent in Whitestrean notions of that student “achievement” and “success”. Instead, the Guajardo brothers advance that students’ sense of place and meaning making rather than decontextualized future earnings or social mobility promoted in subtractive schooling’s epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016; Valenzuela, 1999). In the Guajardo brothers’ project, success is measured by students’ returning to the community as conscientized community leaders or by honoring the community as part of a success story, not by “escaping” to urban-professional settings and leaving their families and previous identities behind. Emerging from our critical understandings of Aztlán, Gran México, our work here strives to newly initiate the Guajardo brothers’ project by both identifying subtractive schooling’s epistemicide and by exemplifying projects that promote critical place-based pedagogies in our region.

Presenter 1 Coloniality of Whiteness in El Sur de Tejas, Aztlan Our research report seeks to provide an historicized and socially contextualized answer to the following question: Do Mexican-American science teachers whiten their Mexican-American students? Rather than focusing exclusively on the teachers’ as whitening agents, our report follows an understanding of the coloniality of whiteness directly into the schooling contexts in el Sur de Tejas, Aztlán. Our critical framings allow us to follow newly theorized research in subject area teaching with special reference to science and STEM education. Our use of ethnographic case study method complements our aims of adding to newly theorized research in STEM by methodologically setting the stage for historicized and contextualized qualitative studies of teaching and learning in context. Our findings articulate the pernicious works of the coloniality of whiteness with specific reference to the overwhelming presence of the English language and English in standardized science education curriculum along with teachers’ exigencies to implement and manage demands of standardized tests.

Presenter 2 A Pedagogy of Place: Re-envisioning Education in the Rio Grande Valley This study re-envisions knowledge as a means of empowered and transformative curriculum, which stimulates the critical and social consciousness. Critical pedagogy, through the deconstruction of knowledge shapes social and historical views so that it reconsiders cultural wealth as a significant component in the sustainability of community. Thus, teaching in the Rio Grande Valley requires a critical understanding of place and an open-ended border pedagogy. Locating intersections of experience and crossing cultures, lays the groundwork for gaining an affiliation to the community. This dismantles the hegemonic perspectives of land and citizenship, as a means of critical reflection and consciousness raising. As such, this research connects to a border pedagogy, shifting the focus to the cultural knowledge, skills, resources, and histories of the community.

Presenter 3 Arrebatando Experiencias Escolares: Infusing Chicanx Studies into Chicana Preservice Teachers Social Studies Methods Classes This research report explores Chicana preservice teachers’ experiences of Chicanx studies curriculum in social studies methods classes. Drawing on itinerant curriculum theory, this report works at the intersections of decolonial theory, ethnic studies curriculum, and Chicanx studies as framings, with a special focus on Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptual content. Within a large Hispanic Serving Institution in the US-México borderlands, this report uses plática as critical and culturally sustainable research method to render the experiences of the participants and researchers. Data collected here included discussions on culturally sustainable teaching, discussions on decolonization, and student projects on Chicanx studies. Analyzed via qualitative thematic coding, findings emphasized that infusing Chicanx Studies into preservice teachers social studies methods curriculum gave Chicana pre-service teachers the opportunity to think critically about whitestream standardized curriculum along with emergent commitments toward culturally sustainable teaching.

Presenter 4 A Conceptual Infrastructure for Culturally Sustaining Science Practices in the RGV, Aztlán: Creating Agentes de Cambio The purpose of this pedagogical essay is to outline a conceptual infrastructure that advances a culturally sustaining science practices related to science education, science curriculum, and Chicana science teachers in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), Aztlán. Culturally sustaining science practices, by definition, refer to science practices that advance understandings of science, science education, and science curriculum that inherently value community-based science, cultural and bioregional sustainability, and the critical conscientization of Chicana teachers in our region. Our conceptual infrastructure outlined below seeks to provide a group of intersecting concepts that articulate our notion of culturally sustaining science practices within the context of the RGV whose intellectual content is transferable to other regions interested in sustainable practices writ large. Overall, at the center of our intersecting conceptual framework, we emphasize a regionally-based articulation of Freire’s conscientization. Our discussion and conclusion shares emergent applications of the framework from the teaching and learning of Authors 1 and 2.

References Gruenwald, D. A. (2003a). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3-13.

Gruenwald. D. A. (2003b). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40, 619-654.

Guajardo, F. (1997). Studying ourselves in our schools: An idea/project guide for Edcouch-Elsa and La Villa teachers. El Llano Grande Journal, 1(1), 1-15.

Guajardo, F. (2007). Teacher researcher and agent for community change: A South Texas highschool experience. Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 2(1), 26-42.

Guajardo, F., Guajardo, M., Oliver, J. & Keawe, L. O. M. A. (2012). Framework for a new political praxis: Respeto, dignidad y conocimiento. Association of Mexican-American Educators Journal, 6(1), 52-60.

Guajardo, F., Pérez, D., Guajardo, M., Dávila, E., Ozuna, J., Saenz, M., & Casaperalta, N. (2006). Youth voice and the Llano Grande Center. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 9, 359-362.

Guajardo, M. & Guajardo, F. (2002). Critical ethnography and community change. In E. Trueba & Y. Zou (Eds.), Ethnography and schools: Qualitative approaches to the study of education. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Paraskeva, J. M. (2016). Curriculum epistemicide: Toward an itinerant curriculum theory. Routledge.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling. State University of New York Press.