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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (5 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2019)
In this research article, Cati V. de los Ríos examines US-Mexican transnational youths' engagement with the Mexican musical genre corridos, border folk ballads, and its subgenre, narcocorridos, folk ballads that illuminate elements of the drug trade and often glamorize drug cartels. She draws from ethnographic methods to present empirical knowledge of four young musicians' critical readings of these genres and their place-making and community-binding practices across their public high school. She demonstrates how these transnational youth draw from their communicative practices to construct meaningful communities on their school campus and details how their evocative musical school performances serve as a cultural resistance to contemporary anti-migrant sentiments. Rather than positioning youth consumption of narcocorridos as simply a “deviant” activity, the findings argue that youth engage critically, intellectually, and aesthetically with narcocorridos as a popular culture practice and that some songs carry important transnational critiques and lessons on capitalism, state-sanctioned violence, and globalization.
    Cover page: “Los Músicos”: Mexican Corridos, the Aural Border, and the Evocative Musical Renderings of Transnational Youth
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Riverside Previously Published Works (2017)
    While current research focuses on the marginalization and educational crises of students classified as English language learners - whom we identify as emergent bilinguals (García & Kleifgen, 2010) - this article highlights some of the contexts for learning that help these students thrive academically, culturally, and socially in two urban English classrooms. We explore the concept of translanguaging (García, 2009a; García & Li Wei, 2014) through the writing of two students who took up this practice as a challenge to coloniality in English classrooms. We also outline how two secondary teachers in New York City and Los Angeles adopted a translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). Through our analysis of two focal emergent bilingual students, we demonstrate how a translanguaging pedagogy - one that puts students' language practices at the center and makes space for students to draw on their fluid linguistic and cultural resources at all times - is a necessary step forward in twenty-first-century English instruction. Our findings illustrate that the teachers' translanguaging pedagogies disrupted the inherently monolingual and colonial tendencies of English classrooms through curricula that promoted metalinguistic awareness and reflection about their own linguistic and cultural identities, and integrated students' diverse language practices to push back against colonialist ideologies. Our study adds to the nascent body of literature that translates theories of translanguaging into practical pedagogical approaches in secondary English classrooms.
      Cover page: Translanguaging, Coloniality, and English Classrooms: An Exploration of Two Bicoastal Urban Classrooms
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Davis Previously Published Works (2019)
      Drawing from the theoretical contributions of Ethnic Studies, activist new media, and critical digital literacies, this article explores the nature of a ninth-grade curricular unit about how one’s daily environment impacts one’s health and well-being. Using a combination of ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods, the authors highlight an Ethnic Studies teacher’s innovative and community-based pedagogy that honed students’ critical digital literacies and civic action practices through their engagement with the digital media app “See, Click, Fix.” Findings detail students’ perspectives about how the unit both helped them resist deficit-oriented ideologies and served as a conduit for critical civic literacies. The authors contend that the fostering of critical digital literacies remain extremely imperative to the future and expansion of Ethnic Studies courses.
        Cover page: “See, Click, Fix”: Civic Interrogation and Digital Tools in a Ninth-Grade Ethnic Studies Course
        • Thesis
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2021)

        It is well documented how the cumulative social toxins of systemic oppression and racism have detrimental consequences on the health and wellbeing of low-income Young People of Color (YPOC). There is a growing recognition among community educators and activists that healing constitutes a critical intervention to fostering Young People’s individual and collective capacity to hope and believe that their living conditions can be transformed (Ginwright, 2015). Healing is understood as a process that is inclusive of mind, body, culture, and spirit and aims to restore and renew the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing of Young People, educators, and the broader community. However, not much research has examined how community educators, practitioners and Young People are making meaning and building innovative practices inclusive of healing to facilitate a sense of positive identity and wellbeing among Young People of Color. By centering the testimonios of community educators, practitioners and YPOC, this dissertation examines how healing is a fundamental praxis to harnessing the power of critical consciousness, culture, and hope among Young People. Healing offers alternative models and strategies to building healthy and resilient communities in response to the ongoing physical, mental, and spiritual violence of systems of oppression. Based on the testimonios of community educators and practitioners, Young People of Color, and participant observation in community spaces that center healing and social justice, this work explores the emergence of a decolonizing healing praxis that centers healing as a critical process by which to facilitate individual and collective agency with Young People of Color. As a methodological tool, testimonios provide great insights into the life experiences and reflexivity of participants in this project. For this work, healing is understood as a process inclusive of mind, body, culture, and spirit and aims to restore and renew the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing of Young People, educators, and the broader community. Testimonios serve as a healing tool that aims to heal the fragmentation inflicted by historical and ongoing trauma while aiming to strengthen the desire to create community and movement. Participants' understanding and embodiment of healing is transformative. It seeks to address root causes of oppression and decolonizing in that it works to create a third space that goes beyond trauma informed and fosters the intrinsic value of going within to facilitate collective healing with YPOC in the larger project of decolonization. I argue that what I am calling a decolonizing healing praxis facilitates healing spaces that provide a context for young people to reconceptualize individual challenges as a politicized collective struggle, and through this process, create a platform for both Young People and educators of color to collectively engage in healing and transformative relations. I elaborate a robust analytic of healing to emphasize a focus on educators and YPOC’s mind, body, and spirit as key to understanding the role healing practices play in supporting transformative and holistic modes of teaching and learning. The findings from these testimonios uplift the cultural healing wealth fostered in community spaces, which center healing practices that are culturally relevant and draw from a diverse range of healing modalities. Moreover, it highlights how a decolonizing healing praxis can support Young People in their individual and collective healing processes to nurture their resilience, hope, and capacity to see themselves as agents of change.

          Cover page: Decolonizing Healing Praxis: Testimonios of Hope & Transformation among Community Educators and Practitioners and Young People of Color
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Davis Previously Published Works (2019)
          This article briefly reviews the colonial roots of English education in the United States and outlines current practices that perpetuate harm in the lives of students of color in K-12 schools. Through an examination of theoretical scholarship and empirical research related to repairing the harm invoked by colonizing English education practices, the authors collectively build on Winn’s (2013) call for researchers to imagine and engage in practices of restorative teacher education within specific area groups. Drawing on their collective research experiences, the authors highlight practices that support the reparative, restorative, and humanizing literacy pedagogies necessary for 21st century schools, with the aim of deepening knowledge and practices that advance “restorative English education”.
            Cover page: Upending Colonial Practices: Toward Repairing Harm in English Education
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