A critical discourse analysis of Gisela's family story: a construal of deportation,illegal immigrants,and literacy

In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this story, and she wrote and illustrated this with the help of her father, student peers, and me. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa's constructs of nepantla and nepantlera, narrative analysis, and systemic functional linguistics to show how Gisela's construed this story to create a powerful and creative narrative that disrupted autonomous forms of literacy along with the excluding and damaging discourses circulating about immigrants in our community.     

Pedagogical Border Crossings: Testimonio y Reflexiones de una Mexicana Académica

I am an assistant professor at New Mexico State University; however, the path to getting to this position has been about crossing borders, about learning in and from the borderlands. The borderlands that my body has had to cross, physically and figuratively, have left many heridas abiertas (open wounds) but have also provided me with knowledge. The pain and struggles are constant reminders of the collisions that happen between el primer y tercer mundo and how these experiences leave open wounds. The inextricable relationship between Mexico and the US is deepened as Mexicanos like me are forced to come to El Norte, whether by choice or brought by parents. At almost 11 years old, my life changed—I crossed, with the help of a coyote, into Los Angeles, California. In the US, xenophobic spaces and actions have influenced and shaped my epistemologies and my awareness/conocimiento about navigating anti-immigrant spaces. This conocimiento was affirmed by and informs my teaching and research. This acute awareness, facultad (Anzaldúa, 1987), and use of these teaching tools are what I term pedagogical border crossings.     

Teaching the Teachers: Dismantling Racism and Teaching for Social Change

As a response to the attacks on ethnic studies in Arizona and the move to ban certain books, this essay presents theoretical and pedagogical reflections from two professors and addresses the ways teacher preparation programs can offer a resistance. Based on the authors’ experience in teacher preparation programs, one in the humanities and the other in mathematics, they discuss fundamental concepts that undergird social change methodology from Gloria Anzaldúa (la facultad and conocimiento) and from Isabel Gunning’s work (World Traveling). Ultimately, our premise is that teachers of teachers can impact the curricula in significant ways that result in dismantling racism and in teaching that is focused on positive social change. We posit that the university classroom where future teachers are trained must address (1) Equity issues, (2) Cultural identity or cultural framing, and (3) Culturally relevant strategies and teaching, modeled by the university professor.     

Ciencia en Nepantla: the journey of Nepantler@s in science learning and teaching

This paper presents a new approach to science education that takes a path through sociocultural theory and into the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa. We apply Anzaldúan theory to science education by illustrating it in action through various examples which explore the multidimensionality of teaching science with Latin@ students in various contexts including dual language settings. We present what it is to journey through transformation using examples from educators at various levels of science within the world of teaching science with Latin@ students in the U.S. Our examples illustrate how Latin@ students cross many cultural borders in Spanish, English, Latin@ home culture, school culture, and the world of scientific dialogue and content, and in doing so, go through tensions and transformations between dominant and non-dominant worlds, which should be acknowledged and better understood through Anzaldúan theory. Fundamentally, we present a transformative notion of Latin@ science learning as “living on the bridges” of many dialogic and cultural practices, and having to negotiate these in-between spaces, or “nepantla” (Anzaldu´a and Keating in Interviews, Psychology Press, London, 2000), where Latin@ students must contend with the fragmented and sometimes painful struggle of living in racialized reality amidst the demands of a dominant culture, and where transformation and healing are possible through the path of conocimiento. We advocate for teachers to become science teacher nepantler@s, who guide their students through nepantla, and into a new mestiz@ consciousness of science education.     

“I Solemnly Swear that I Am up to No Good”: Mapping My Way through TESOL Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

This article documents my 2-year sojourn from voicelessness – in the face of normalizing discourses about race, privilege, and difference in teacher education scholarship – to an authentic voice capable of addressing normalizing discourses from a position of inclusivity. This journey has involved my face-to-face and even mediated engagement with a critical community of human scholars. In difference to most self-study work, it has included my dialogic engagement with literary (Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa) and popular (J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) textual critical partners. In highlighting the role of these textual partners in my self-study research, I draw upon the field of cognitive poetics and reader response theory to push against the boundaries of self-study practice and methodology.     

Navigating the academic borderlands as multiracial and trans* faculty members

ABSTRACT

Postsecondary institutions remain bastions of oppression, threat and harm for faculty who hold minoritized identities. While some scholars have explored the ways in which monoracial faculty of color and LGBT faculty members navigate an academy that is steeped in racism, genderism, sexism and other systems of oppression, there remains a paucity of scholarship focused on the experiences of multiracial faculty and nonbinary trans* faculty. Given the need to focus on faculty who hold liminal identities in relation to hegemonic identitarian illogic, we used Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory and an auto-ethnographic analysis to explore our academic experiences as faculty members whose identities place us betwixt-and-between socially constructed monolithic identity categories.     

Disenchanting secularism (or the cultivation of soul) as pedagogy in resistance to populist racism and colonial structures in the academy

This article explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation to ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental—to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento or the ‘cultivation of soul’. The article draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion.     

Identity Production in Figured Worlds: How Some Multiracial Students Become Racial Atravesados/as

Using Holland et al.’s (Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity and their concept of figured worlds, this article provides an overview of how twenty-five undergraduates of color came to produce a Multiracial identity. Using Critical Race Theory methodology with ethnographic interviewing as the primary method, I specifically focus on the ways in which Multiracial figured worlds operate within a racial borderland (Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera—The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987), an alternate, marginal world where improvisational play (Holland et al. in Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) and facultad became critical elements of survival. Participants exercised their agency by perforating monoracial storylines and developed a complex process of identity production that informed their behaviors by a multifaceted negotiation of positionalities. I end by focusing on implications for urban education that can be drawn from this study.     

Reconciling Divisions in the Field of Authentic Education

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to identify and address three central divisions in the field of authentic education that introduce ambiguity and at times inconsistencies within the field of authentic education. These divisions concern a) the relationship between autonomy and authenticity; b) the division between the two basic attitudes towards ‘care’ in the authenticity literature, and; c) the well‐worn division between objective and subjective realms of knowledge and identity construction. Addressing these divisions through Charles Taylor's distinction between active and passive aspects of authenticity, I believe, will lead to a better understanding of the main issues involved in conceptualising and applying authenticity‐based education. Second, to present what I call The Postconventional Authentic Relation‐to‐Self (PARTS) as a basis for overcoming and reconciling the above divisions. I shall conclude by providing some examples of the way the perspective envisioned by PARTS can be applied to educational practices.     

Violence,Silence and Storytelling: The Dilemma of Matricide in Women’s Memoirs

In this paper I explore how women’s thinking subjectivity is structured by a need to negotiate between identifying with and repudiating our mothers. Oriented by Melanie Klein’s theory of matricide which posits that an infant’s capacity to think for herself originates in her need to separate from her mother, I consider the implications of this structure for women’s gendered experiences of intellectualism. To examine how this dilemma of matricide animates women’s thinking lives I read Helen M. Buss’s criticism of Carolyn Kay Steedman’s memoir Landscape for a Good Woman. I argue that Buss’s criticism of Steedman is symptomatic of her ambivalent relation to the problem of identification and repudiation that drives her own intellectual labour. I then turn to a scene in Buss’s memoir, Memoirs from Away, to examine how the matricidal dilemma resonates through her work of reading other women’s memoirs and of writing her own.     

Teaching Against the Grain as an Act of Love: Disrupting White Eurocentric Masculinist Frameworks Within Teacher Education

What is radical love in teaching? How can radical love incite change and transformation within teacher education? What does radical love entail to prepare critically minded teachers for urban schools? In this conceptual paper, we respond to these questions through our individual and collective experiences as social justice oriented teacher educators preparing students to teach in urban schools. We engage with our womanist ways of knowing (Walker in In search of our mothers’ gardens: womanist prose, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2004) and “theory in flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa in This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, 2nd edn, Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, New York, 1983) to collaboratively reflect and analyze our conversations, reflective journaling, meetings, and other telling moments about what it means to practice radical love in teaching. More specifically, we identify three central concepts of what love as an act of resistance or teaching against the grain entails: (1) vulnerability, (2) collective support and healing, and (3) critique. Through these concepts we offer a framework from which to practice radical love in teaching and work in solidarity with others to transform oppressive systems in urban (teacher) education.     

Comadres among Us: The Power of Artists as Informal Mentors for Women of Color in Academe

In this article, we, colegas/colleagues of color, explore the ways in which the literary and artistic contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa, Octavia Butler, and Frida Kahlo have inspired, nurtured, and profoundly influenced our personal and professional lives as academics. We underscore the importance of mentoring for women of color in academe and educational leadership, particularly the psychosocial functions associated with informal mentoring. Further, we discuss how the lives and contributions of our “mentors” impacted our scholarly journeys, framed by third-wave and decolonial woman-of-color-feminism. In this article, we offer an alternative consideration for women of color in search of suitable mentors, concludes by sharing the lessons we learned from the artists. Thinking about mentoring from the position of alterity adds to the general mentoring discourse and serves to inspire women to consider alternatives when seeking mentorship to reach academic and professional goals.     

Mexican American Women Pursuing Counselor Education Doctorates: A Narrative Inquiry

The authors used narrative inquiry and Anzaldúa's ( 1999 ) bordlerlands theory to understand the cultural experiences of 5 Mexican American women in doctoral programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. Results indicated that participants navigated multiple cultural spheres and that the doctoral program culture affected their professional identity. Implications for counselor education include engaging Mexican American women in academic activities congruent with their ethnic identities.     

Transnational Mexican-Origin Families' Ways of Knowing: A Framework Toward Bridging Understandings in U.S. Schools

Transnational students and families are those who cross real and metaphoric borders, spanning countries, to engage family and community in meaningful ways. Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, I show the distinct ways of knowing of four Mexican-origin, working class families and how the U.S. schools where the children from these families study hardly recognize these ways of knowing. The families’ ways of knowing can be characterized as a form of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls conocimiento, or knowing, under three interweaving categories: Nepantlera or in-between, bridge-building knowing; sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing; and chained knowing, in which families are chained in their knowing to the realities of the U.S./Mexican border and their extended communities and families who also are impacted by the border. The article shows that schools recognize neither transnational practices, such as return trips to Mexico, nor transnational ways of knowing. Educators may strengthen their own ways of knowing and create a more equitable pedagogy for all students if they learn to help co-construct the bridges families such as the ones in this study have already begun to build.     

The ‘punk rock principal’: a metaphor for rethinking educational leadership

ABSTRACT

This paper advances an alternative leadership metaphor of ‘punk rock leadership’. I work through the usefulness of a metaphor of punk rock leadership as a way of exploring one principal's vision of leadership and his efforts to work outside of system expectations in his quest to achieve the school's goals. In doing so, I contribute to our wider understanding of the methodological process, affordances, and challenges of using metaphors to theorise empirical data. Empirically, this paper contributes to critical research into principals’ practices in times of change, and to notions of power and leadership discourses in schools.     

Border Crossings: Undocumented Migration Between Mexico and the United States in Contemporary Young Adult Literature

This study identifies patterns in 11 English language young adult novels from the past three decades (1981–2011) which depict undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States. The increase in YA novels on this topic demonstrates rising public concern. These books offer sympathetic identification with border crossing youth. Eight of the 11 books use narration from the perspective of the border crosser. Six of the protagonists are transported by parents, while the others make the decision to enter the United States without authorization. The border crossers struggle against antagonistic forces of poverty, physical danger, and immigration laws. Migration is not a unidirectional movement from Mexico into the United States; most, but not all, of the border crossers live in the United States at the narratives’ conclusions. These literary works implicitly urge the “empathetic outreach” of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands philosophy and argue for what Pablo Ramirez terms a “borderlands ethical stance” in which individuals justifiably violate laws. This essay advances discourse about Mexican immigration into the United States by establishing fundamental characteristics of the YA novel about undocumented migration, analyzing significant examples, and exploring implications for teachers.     

Centering Nepantla Literacies from the Borderlands: Leveraging “In-Betweenness” Toward Learning in the Everyday

This article argues that building powerful literacies involves the centering of dispositions and practices that thrive on the boundary—spaces that are not always sanctioned as educational. Leveraging youths’ repertoires is particularly important for educators of nondominant learners who are committed to challenging characterizations of their students as being inept or deficient. To this end, we address how the design of learning opportunities that attend to polylingual repertoires (Gutiérrez, Bien, Selland, & Pierce, 2011)—the use of multiple languages and forms of expression-—can open up opportunities, pathways, for youth to leverage new identities as resources for consequential learning. We advance the idea of organizing learning environments where youth playfully negotiate their nepantla identities that are often in a “state of perpetual transition” (Anzaldúa, 1999, p. 100). We argue that nepantla literacies, or literacies that thrive in the boundary, emerge through negotiations with syncretic (Gutiérrez, 2014) literacies—those that are valued in the academy and across spaces and communities.     

AESA 2012 Presidential Address “What My Community Means To Me”: Reimagining Civic Praxis With Latina/Chicana Feminisms

This article invites imaginings of democracy and education with and through “other” knowledges. It argues for the possibilities of working across difference as articulated in the transnational, border, and decolonial perspectives of Chicana/Latina feminisms. Specifically, it explores Gloria Anzaldúa's notions of nos/otras (we, we/they, us/them), and conocimiento (knowledge with wisdom) as an example of thinking with other knowledges in civic praxis. Notions of community and civic engagement are then examined through a personal testimonio stemming from early memories of participation in a civic organization's sponsored essay contest, “What my community means to me.” Testimonio is used to critique civic exclusions but also to reimagine and animate other knowledges in the development of conocimiento for redefining community and civic participation. Lastly, this article briefly explores one example of how local activists are building communities of civic praxis for racial justice. Latina/Chicana feminisms are useful for reflecting on practices of community and coalition building across difference in a cross-race, cross-class coalitional context.     

Post-panopticism and school inspection in England

In this paper, I draw on a study of school leaders’ experiences of inspection to argue that repeated changes to school inspection policy in England constitute a post-panoptic regime. Thinking with and against Foucault, I elaborate post-panopticism, here characterised by: subjects’ visibility; ‘fuzzy’ norms; the exposure of subjects’ failure to comply; the disruption of identity-constituting fabrications; its dependence on external ‘experts’; and its neo-conservative devalorisation of the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that post-panopticism depends on subjects having become disciplined through panopticism, whose apparatus it employs, and reveals the state’s explicit exercise of power.