“Counterstory Mapping Our City”: Teachers Reckoning with Latinx Students’ Knowledges, Cultures, and Communities

Abstract

The study focuses on a two-week unit with 90 students at an urban, Latinx-serving charter middle and high school in the south midwestern U.S. to create digital counterstory maps. The maps then served as the organizing content for a subsequent week-long summer professional development the authors led for their teachers. Analysis suggests the significance of engaging the students’ counterstories and cultural knowledge for designing teacher education committed to culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP). Further, it articulates the challenges for engaging CSP with students and teachers in a charter school context in which disciplinary and curricular mandates conflate cultural assimilation with academic achievement.

Fostering youth agency in a datafied world: Unraveling cartographies of possibility with speculative education and youth participatory action research in the Nayah-Irú curriculum

“…This shift has led to a significant body of literature that focuses on multicultural theory (Banks, 2013), culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 2014) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) to make sense of the lived experiences of youth out-of-school in order to imagine new pedagogical approaches. Paris's approach to culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) seeks to overcome dominant language, literacies, and cultural ways of knowing, sustaining, and extending youth cultures rather than focusing on creating curricula that may only focus on being relevant or responsive (Paris, 2012;Dyke et al 2020). The work of Ladson-Billings (2006) and Valenzuela (2005) have demonstrated the benefits of introducing youth cultures and histories as ways of knowing.…”

“…The work of Ladson-Billings (2006) and Valenzuela (2005) have demonstrated the benefits of introducing youth cultures and histories as ways of knowing. Still, the voices of marginalized youth are largely underrepresented in the design of learning experiences due to racial, linguistic, cultural, and gendered hierarchies encoded into merit-based, colorblind policies (Dyke et al 2020).…”

“…On the one hand, maps are analog representations of space, but they are also abstractions which represent the perspectives of those people who make the maps to produce memories in space that can perpetuate certain memories over others (Harvey, 1996). Maps first acted as advertisements, seeking to encourage settlers to move to vast and fictitiously empty landscapes; maps were also used to abstract and simplify how imperialism operated (Scott, 1999;Dyke et al 2020). However, despite being artifacts used by states to disseminate ideas about hegemony, maps have also been used by communities to tell stories that go beyond state-driven narratives.…”

“…The construction of counterspaces is an approach to pedagogy, research and methodology that challenges oppressive structures by pluralizing our conceptions of place (Frith & Richter, 2021), thus allowing marginalized communities to tap into cultural intuition, community knowledge traditions, and collective memory (Dyke et al, 2020). Counterspaces as cartography can provide insights into culturally informed knowledge of place that considers multiple perspectives of the lived experiences of educators and students and educators enacting different forms of (re)mapping (Goeman, 2013) which can be defined as: the labor Native authors and the communities they write within and about undertake in the simultaneously metaphoric and material capacities of map making, to generate new possibilities (p.3).…”

Deepening middle school english teachers' understanding of and capacity for critical literacy practices through coach-facilitated professional learning communities

“…On a more personal level, teachers have to actively consider their own positionality, as well as its impact and limitations, on the kind of lessons and curriculum they design (Crawford et al, 2020). Teachers using critical literacy practices may also have to take on the daunting task of pushing against restrictive or oppressive policies, which is not always a viable option for all teachers (Dyke et al, 2020).…”