Alicia Rusoja
2 articles-
Abstract
With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Marva Cappello, Jennifer D. Turner, and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton, Darielle Blevins, Justin Coles, Autumn A. Griffin, Stephanie P. Jones, Alicia Rusoja, Amy Stornaiuolo, Claudine Taaffe, Tran Templeton, Vivek Vellanki, and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see ) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (), we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access, equity, and hope in education and educational research.
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“Our Community Is Filled with Experts”: The Critical Intergenerational Literacies of Latinx Immigrants that Facilitate a Communal Pedagogy of Resistance ↗
Abstract
Anti-immigrant legal violence and grassroots organizing against it have fundamentally shaped the lives of immigrant children and families in the US. This article inquires into the intergenerational literacy, teaching, and learning practices of Latinx immigrants’ political mobilization, drawing on qualitative data from a larger yearlong practitioner inquiry study that involved observant participant field notes, artifacts, photographs, and in-depth interviews with 11 undocumented and documented Latinx immigrants with whom I, a Latina immigrant, shared an organizing practice. Through analysis grounded on literacy as critical sociocultural practice, intergenerational learning, and Chicana/Latina education in everyday life, I argue that Latinx immigrants mobilize against oppression through critical literacy practices that facilitate what I theorize as a “communal pedagogy of resistance.” This is an intergenerational pedagogy enacted in communal spaces that grows from Latinx immigrants’facultad,meaning the critical consciousness and epistemic privilege that results from living in the liminal space of theborderlands. This pedagogy views our community’s cultural, literacy, and linguistic practices as strengths and tools of resilience and resistance, and expands our definition of family and our sense of interdependence to fellow oppressed communities, teaching us to enact inclusive justice. A key takeaway is that Latinx immigrant students’ educational and literacy practices cannot be separated from those of their wider family/community, nor from their intergenerational sociopolitical struggles and expertise. Another is that intergenerational literacy and learning are bi/multidirectional. Implications include the need for educational institutions to learn from this pedagogy, and for additional literacy research into communal sociopolitical mobilization.