ABSTRACT. Teacher education-related literature naming the importance of explicit engagement with identity-based, deleterious issues and concerns pertaining to race and ethnicity is pervasive. Yet, said literature largely fails to address particular and significant racial exclusions, complexities, and divergences as such occur in localized contexts within both art education and teacher education broadly defined. The following three-paper panel proposal, in turn, speaks to these epistemic forms of absence that enact modes of identity violence in the classroom, and endeavors to provide contextually-relevant, racially-conscious, active antiracist advocacy relative to the need to redress racialized curricular omission and reduction.

ABSTRACT. Any and all interested mentees and mentors who are free at this time are HIGHLY encouraged the morning mentoring session on October 16 followed by an informal mentoring meeting to be announced on the October 17 . These sessions intend to make the C&P conference and community a bit less mysterious, as more seasoned C&Pers allow for Q&A with the audience, as well as fleshing out some of the philosophy, design, and intended function of the evolving mentoring program. This will offer a chance for those participating to make introductions and connections both between and across assigned mentor/mentee pairings.

ABSTRACT. The are many power struggles facing students and teachers of the LBGTQ community in and out of the United States education system. We set out to explore those power structures and how criminalizing they can be for LBGTQ youth. We also set out show how educators can disrupt them by confronting heteronormativity and homonationalism head-on by creating an inclusive environment that values diversity over discipline.

ABSTRACT. While scholars of do-it-yourself (DIY) music traditions, i.e. punk and hardcore, have long considered the socio-cultural practices of underground music scenes, researchers have not adequately addressed the pedagogical practices of DIY. In response, I analyze videos of performances from the band G.L.O.S.S. and percussionist Sarah Hennies that explore themes of trans identity through DIY music. While both artists rely on relational aesthetics, varying epistemological assumptions lead to highly divergent affective responses from the audience. These distinctions align themselves with Freirean pedagogical theories, with G.L.O.S.S. relying on “banking theories” of learning and Hennies enacting Freire’s liberatory use of codifications.

ABSTRACT. My only access point to understanding and fitting into a world that should accept me without reservations is this language that I never learned and for most of my life greatly feared. Without pointing fingers or even trying to understand the processes, until very recently, I felt rejected by my culture and banished to Nowhere. Not very different from the students in DeNicolo’s et al. (2015) study, I too have found that testimonios and counternarratives allow me to see myself differently. This testimonio shares my decolonial pedagogical process as a non-Spanish speaking Latina struggling to heal and love.

ABSTRACT. In this paper I use space and place theory and decolonial theory to unsettle the acritical use of “ethnographic research” in education. I discuss how ethnography, despite its complicity with colonialism and coloniality, may offer activist researchers the space to engage in work that is immersive, reciprocal, dialogic, politico-pedagogical, situated, and place-based. In addition to sharing the methodological potential of activist ethnographic research, I offer an ethnographic, sociocultural account of the ways in which university student activists in Honduras work collectively toward transforming the university’s extant colonial space into a place of resistance.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I used small stories narrative and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy to understand how educators work with and care for immigrant and undocumented students and to examine the educator’s experiences as it relates to her personal and professional identities. Data included in-depth interviews, observations, and artifacts. By using small narrative stories, my research was able to make meaning of the tensions that arose from the participants past experiences as an immigrant student, as well as how those tensions relate to the participants critical reflexivity of community and cultural practices.

ABSTRACT. The presenters in this symposium hope to highlight the vicissitudes between private/public identities of the transfronteriza youth located in the borderlands between the NE-Mexico and the SE-United States. The researchers in this panel conducted ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and participant observations with Mexican-American and Mexican youth from both nation-states. We began with a theoretical journey, subsequently, and during one year, the researchers gathered data and were able to contextualize the information shared by the young people with whom we worked.

ABSTRACT. Hispanic female women have been underrepresented in Science Technology Engineering and Math workforce, due to a lack of interest in taking STEM courses at the high school and college level. This interest in STEM can be cultivated early, in elementary school, and must be nurtured well into the high school level and supported through college. Two Hispanic female educators are incorporating six steps to moving towards a 21st century STEM vision and encouraging more Hispanic female students to pursue STEM careers.

ABSTRACT. Identities are complex for Asians in the United States; the wide variation in backgrounds leads to a diversity of cultural customs spanning language, religion, food – everything traditionally associated with individual and cultural identity. However, the model minority myth has perpetuated problematic notions of (un)Asianness. This study is a collective journey of six Asian females in higher education recounting their personal stories using autoethnography and probing each other’s narratives. We use the Currere method to understand what power dynamics are at play in shaping one’s personal and social identities and its implications for education.

ABSTRACT. Place-based education has grown in popularity in K-12 classrooms over the last several decades.   David Sobel, one of the central figures of the modern movement, defines PBE as the process of using the local community and  environment as a  starting point  to teach concepts across the curriculum.    The purpose of this presentation is to discuss research that examines teachers’ conceptions of place-based education in the design and implementation of a project that they created as participants in the Champlain Research Experience for Secondary Teachers or “CREST” Program.

ABSTRACT. What motivated two teachers from the Rio Grande Valley to pursue their doctoral degrees and become researchers? We created our digital testimonios to look at ourselves in a new perspective and find what drives us to continue our education. Testimonios are a way to look within ourselves and find the details which make us who we are.

ABSTRACT. This is a proposal advances a series of graduate student panel discussions on the state of cultural studies in education hosted by faculty and doctoral students at the University of Texas Austin (UT-Aus) and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UT-RGV). The purpose of these panel discussions is to juxtapose emergent research, intergenerational conversation, and impressions regarding the state of cultural studies in education.

ABSTRACT. Frontera liminality positions us in a paradoxical landscape. In community, social contexts, we locate and share collective autoethnographic narratives, art, participation, poetry, action. Within a large Hispanic community with strong ties to Mexican and indigeneous (Apache Carrizo-Comecrudo) ancestry powered by proximity to Mexico, its desire to protect the Spanish/Tex-Mex language and culture, and its own-local-regional re-creation, the university where we teach, research, and serve is an integral member of this vibrant community. We, leveraging our transplanted diversity, offer different perspectives and decolonializing opportunities for all community members to understand and discover the lived curricula and their/our power to manifest dreams.

ABSTRACT. We are amigas, but our hermandad developed, grew, and bloomed because we share our personal and academic lives at multiple levels. This project explores the different levels of connection that we maintain, nurture, sustain, strengthen, and endure in diverse contexts through the lens of Chicana feminist epistemology and Critical Race Theory. We approach this critical reflection through duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2016), which allows us to create meaning and uncover understandings as Latinas, mothers, academics, and feminists immersed in dominant societies.

ABSTRACT. Bounded, 'traditional' representations of citizenship and legality/illegality are insufficient and exclusionary when considering civic belonging, identity, and engagement among transnationally mobile and linguistically diverse adolescents and young adults. I present findings from a recent interview study framing the intersections of immigrant experience, gender, and educational experience as offering critical insights to self-defined civic membership and engagement among immigrant young women resettled in a Great Plains city which serves as a (largely welcoming) site of significant refugee resettlement in the U.S. Thematic analysis points to a dynamic between the negotiation of citizenship of place versus nation within the context of divisive, often pejorative anti-immigrant rhetoric in national (U.S.) and global politics. Findings indicate crucial need for a re-envisioning of civic and service learning curricula to assert critical and culturally responsive citizenship pedagogies to examine rather than extract politics from classrooms as well as leverage students' ties to cultural, local, and global communities.

ABSTRACT. Proposal Abstract: The landscape of peoples in need has changed dramatically and grows more complex. Leaders and citizens in the United States must decide how best to address the needs and aggregate issues related to the large numbers of newcomer refugees and unaccompanied alien children. Complicating the challenges encountered by newcomer English language learners (ELLs) is the wave of xenophobia that has had a global impact. Gleaning lessons learned from previous United States refugee and asylee programs about the societal adjustment and educational achievement experienced by newcomer ELLs will empower teachers to facilitate greater academic achievement among newcomers.

ABSTRACT. Mainstream curricula of global citizenship in K-12 contexts often emphasize education about “others” in faraway places, disregarding the here and now of teachers and students’ global affiliations, commitments and responsibilities (Gaudelli, 2009; 2013; Subedi, 2013). In the case of immigrant children in the US, there is a mainstream curriculum of global citizenship that offers deficit narratives on children’s cultural backgrounds and their communities (Subedi, 2013). This presentation is based on a curricular study of global citizenship education attuned to the lived experiences of citizenship and belonging of transnational immigrant Latinx youth in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

ABSTRACT. As distance education programs continue to grow, it is important to undress inequitable curricular spaces of support and access to student services to improve our efforts to serve students. This paper will explore the rhetoric of support and access as a powerful component that perpetuate the marginalization of community college women of color in distance education programs.

ABSTRACT. Haitian and Haitian American (H/HA) girls exist within multiple intersections of identities that are not adequately addressed in Curriculum Studies. This study offers pedagogical insights on what it means to generate emancipatory curriculum for Black girls from transnational communities. Taking place at a middle school-level, out-of-school literacy program called the Haitian Empowerment and Literacy Project (HELP) in Miami, Florida, this study asked how the institutional practices of HELP attempted to center the lived experiences of H/HA girls. The author concluded HELP exercised decolonizing pedagogies of ‘literacy as liberation’ to destigmatize Discourses of Haiti and Blackness.

ABSTRACT. Through the use of critical literatures, and life and professional story methodologies informed by Chicana feminist epistemologies, I document the contextualized preparation and professional development of Latina teachers within and beyond a grow-your-own-teacher program. Findings indicate the mechanisms and experiences that proved most impactful for participants’ development and sustainment as well as illustrate an emergence of racialized, identitarian resources among participants. Furthermore, this study implicates a critical need for more nuanced, culturally-contextualized, race-conscious pedagogical approaches to CLD teacher preparation/professional development that can foster critical inquiry, and restorative community building within the often silencing and isolating white-dominated educational spaces that inhabit

ABSTRACT. This study was conducted with novice teachers who had been hired in school districts that have signed a data sharing agreement with the local university. The school district will identify their first-year teachers who are graduates of the local educator preparation program. They were invited to participate in the study. Participation in the study was voluntary.

The overarching research question guiding the study was how do our novice teachers compare with novice teachers nationally?

ABSTRACT. There are many studies about culturally relevant pedagogy at the K-12 level however, there is limited research in higher education. This dissertation explores the lived experiences of Latinx doctoral faculty in the College of Education at three Texas institutions of higher education. It aims to understand how lived experiences inform culturally relevant teaching in the graduate classroom. Culturally relevant educators continuously adjust their teaching practices to meet the academic and social-emotional needs of students. The findings add to the literature on minority educator experiences, the complicated conversation of curriculum, and may impact current teaching methods of doctoral faculty.

ABSTRACT. Accepted realities are abbreviations about peoples and places perpetuated by aggregated world views.  These aggregations only serve to disempower and prolong systemic racial, ethnic, gender, and economic stereotypes.  They are without context and, for minoritized peoples and places, create deficit views of who they are.  In Contrast, contextualized narratives of peoples and places can emerge as powerful counter realities to the aggregate.  These are the “In Spite Of” narratives of people and place.  The Rio Grande Valley is such a people and place.  Join and help us tell our story.         

ABSTRACT. Preparing science and math teachers to be successful in culturally and linguistically diverse classes requires they know their subject matter, how to teach, and how to create a classroom atmosphere that promotes inclusive and equitable practices for all students. This symposium will discuss research that includes the development of teacher agency in secondary STEM teachers using critical race theory and LatCrit as frameworks. One aspect will focus using counter-storytelling and autoethnography situated in a community of practice to explore identity, develop critical consciousness and agency in STEM teacher candidates and teachers.

ABSTRACT. The relationship between visual arts and empirical research is rarely explored. This project gathered narratives and anecdotes that demonstrated how Black educators have responded to instances of racialization and actively chosen to disrupt and push back against structures of whiteness. Without using Arts Based practices, it would have been difficult if not impossible to convey the emotion and experiences if limited to traditional methodologies.

ABSTRACT. The border, as defined by Gloria Anzaldúa, is conceptually marked by an ideological site called nepantla—a space existing in-between worlds. Borderlands Art Pedagogy merges socially engaged art with Anzaldúa’s concepts of nepantla, Coyolxauhqui (simultaneous incompleteness/wholeness), resistance, tension, and hybridity. This exhibition focuses on the intersection of borderlands and the visual arts as pedagogical sites in the Rio Grande Valley. Artists/researchers/teachers present works that engage Borderlands Art Pedagogy in art, school, community, and public spaces.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores Latinx street murals in Texas that highlight workers as well as immigrant worker culture. These street murals are a necessary counter to the erasure of Latinx and worker representations in educational institutions such as museums and schools. The discussion is informed by critical pedagogy, arts-based research, and place-based learning.

ABSTRACT. This paper seeks to address approaches used in a Multi-Ethnic Literature classroom to encourage college students to engage in consciousness, critical questioning, and development of immigration reform. A critical exploration of two books, Américo Parades’ George Washington Gómez and Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, lends itself to a better understanding of America’s stance on immigration policies, while inviting students to contemplate solutions to the social injustices which accompany such strategies using an interdisciplinary approach focusing on immigration of Mexicans Americans from a historical, literary, cultural, and current event perspective.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores the need for educators, especially secondary educators of English, to assert their own individual agency in public classrooms. Drawing from Cope and Kalantzis’ (2000; 2009) discussion on multiliteracies, Palmer and Martinez’s (2013) assertion regarding teachers as advocates of change, and Varghese and Morgan et al. (2005), this session serves as a professional reflection into public education in midst of high stakes testing. I draw from Ralph Ellison's (1952) novel, Invisible Man, to demonstrate how a metaphor of invisibility can be see in Teacher agency within the classroom serves as an empowering vessel.

ABSTRACT. Inspired by Nel Noddings The Challenge to Care in Schools, supported by Love in the Early Childhood Classroom, and driven by the development of a research supported 8 Stage Framework for the Caring Classroom, this qualitative case study research will present an investigation into how teachers perceive care in their classrooms and teaching. The presentation will provide findings generated by through grounded theory analysis for discussion based on observations, document analysis and transcribed semi structured interviews with laboratory teachers in a midwestern Appalachian region.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how arts-based educational research (ABER) might take up resistant or troubled emotions and embodied forms of knowing through art as a method, as data, and as an activist site of pedagogy for anti-oppressive education for the larger community. Using Arts-Based Research, the paper seeks to understand the ways art can promote the production of new forms of knowledge, examine how audiences take up activist art as educative, and establish a baseline study in the field of Curriculum Studies to further theorize the value of affective/emotive/embodied knowledge production that happens in formal and in informal places of learning.

ABSTRACT. There is a tendency to think of our primary emotions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust – as feelings over which we have little control. However, our emotions become educated much the same as does reason. That suggests emotions are not separate from reason, even as they sidestep rational thought at times. Less scholarly attention has been devoted to disgust than to happiness, sadness/melancholia, fear and anger. Educating disgust is embedded in much of the new literature but is not its focus. My effort will be to translate and synthesize the education of disgust from the literature.

ABSTRACT. We understand emotion in the classroom as central to creative ideas, exchanges, and thought. However, schools often restrict students’ use of emotion in fear of it being unstable, uncontrollable, and unstructured and with concerns it will inhibit learning (Lewis, 2011). Examining a 9th grade English Language Arts (ELA) classroom discussion, we use mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris & Jones, 2005) to analyze how students mobilized emotion in their analysis of a poem. Our findings suggest that students’ use of emotion both enabled and constrained particular identities, ideologies, and opportunities for learning.

ABSTRACT. Our intention is to explore Jerome Harste's key curriculum questions rephrased with particular focus on the role that moral frameworks and the development, or strengthening, of virtues have in relation to shaping teacher candidates and teachers’ sense of self and their considerations of teacher leadership skills. We also intend to connect such moral frameworks and the development, or strengthening of virtues, to the landscapes (contexts and relationships) we have been, and are embedded in.

ABSTRACT. This presentation describes and interprets curriculum work done by teacher candidates with Somali American fifth graders. Grounded in commitments to inquiry and co-constructing curriculum based on students’ lived experiences (Freire, 1970; Fairbanks, 1997), the project included 15 undergraduates and 48 fifth graders who worked in small teams to investigate, report on, and take action in relation to questions and issues that they had identified. Our session will focus on the experiences of 4 teacher candidates who worked with two teams of 5th graders to investigate these youth’s worries and anger about immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric in the time of Trump.

ABSTRACT. Rarely talked about in the field of education, precarity has important implications for thinking about children and childhood and the broader social and political contexts in which schooling participates in the suspension of full-fledged personhood of young people. In this symposium, three presenters will explore concepts of precarity, protectionism, and democracy as they are announced in artmaking, classroom curriculum, and teaching. To do so, we will examine incidents drawn from our experiences as teachers, teacher educators and researchers to investigate the complex relationships between, and multiple perspectives of, adults and children in educational contexts.

ABSTRACT. At a time when many voices within United States society are villainizing immigration, it is incumbent upon classroom language teachers to take up the politicized conversation around immigration and invite students to see themselves and their families and community (re)written into their school experiences. An English teach invites students to include home languages in their narratives, and her colleague -a classroom Spanish teacher- invites students to enter the borderland of secondary language classes and the rich, lived linguistic experiences of students within said classes (theirs and others) by creating an assessment to authentically celebrate students’ home languages while equipping them with skills for future educational and occupational experiences.

ABSTRACT. The book is situated within the current, catastrophic political climate, providing a space for curriculum scholars and workers to reflect on past and future directions of our field. These troubled times force us to think critically about our scholarship and pedagogy, our influence on educational practices in multiple registers, and the surrounding communities we claim to serve. This is where the call for our book began: from a desire to think through modern conceptions regarding what counts as activism in the fields of education, curriculum, and pedagogy, and how activist voices and enactments might emerge differently through curriculum and pedagogy.

ABSTRACT. In this book talk, editors and authors describe their contributions to the book Whiteness at the Table: Antiracism, Racism, and Identity, published by Lexington Press (Rowan & Littlefield) in late fall 2018. Featuring selections from the book, the session will also discuss implications for curricular and pedagogical work in teacher education and educational research more broadly. Specifically, chapters on learning to be white in the family (with children and from/with parents experiencing mental illness), antiracist professional development with white practicing teachers, and the problem of “what to do” as white social actors committed to antiracism will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the counseling implications involved with counseling unaccompanied minor refugees, which will be referred to as UMRs (Demazure & Pinsault, 2018). Counselors are most likely to be required to provide additional accommodations for UMR’s being that they often do not speak the language or struggle to become accustomed to living in a new country. UMR’s often experience pre-traumatic and post-traumatic trauma from traveling from their home country to host country. Counselors face challenges and ethical dilemmas when counseling an unaccompanied child.

ABSTRACT. By analyzing the education system in Ontario, Canada, we will explore how students with disabilities are not adequately prepared for participation in the economy. This paper uses provincial database information, statistics and demographics to prove that a lack of inadequate educational resources and training in schools has resulted in disability becoming a leading risk factor for poverty and homelessness in Ontario. Other countries employ co-operative employment initiatives which have been successful in allowing people with disabilities to participate meaningfully in society and the labor force.

ABSTRACT. Teachers today walk a tightrope between teaching curriculum they deem important versus that required by standardized tests. Bilingual teachers especially feel pressured to eliminate curriculum that elevates the minoritized language and positions minority language speakers as valid and valuable knowledge holders because such critical (in both senses of the word) content is not measured by high stakes tests. Historically, the discussion has focused on how to reconcile the needs of emergent bilingual students with testing mandates. I argue that critical bilingual educators have a unique opportunity to change the discussion, hijack the hidden curriculum, and transform standardized testing culture.

ABSTRACT. The Modern Language Association produced a report (Looney, D & Lusin, N, 2018), showing an alarming decrease of enrollment for all second languages. As part of a modern language department, we could not dismiss this information. This investigation presents the result of ongoing “complicated conversations” (Pinar, 2004) that reveal deep borders that define, divide, and tore at the different goals our department wished to implement. In the form of a case study, we present our efforts to rejuvenate our program, while cracking the walls of fear and vain that paralyze us and keeps us from implementing necessary but difficult changes.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this proposal is to explore factors leading to underrepresentation of African Americans in doctoral programs in College of Education disciplines at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Additionally, another goal for the proposal is to identify factors leading African Americans to pursue doctoral studies in College of Education fields at Hispanic Serving Institutions of higher learning. This paper will concentrate on factors influencing African Americans to pursue doctoral studies.

ABSTRACT. In this paper through an autobiographical inquiry is the lived experience of a former actress who relates to her own perspective in learning through arts-based research. This study will be presented through an ethnographic lens which gives way to arts-based learning as a learning and effective pedagogical tool that can help students learn in an innovative way.

ABSTRACT. Despite all that can be learned from readings, video, or class discussion, there’s something to be said for the pedagogical potential of incorporating immersive experiences into coursework to get those a-ha moments for students in one’s courses. In this presentation, I will explore highlights from incorporating some authentic immersive opportunities into a pair of contrasting courses I teach: one a foundations class in urban education for undergrads and the other a graduate course in multiculturalism. It seems wise to take stock of lessons learned along the way to inform future choices when crafting such experiences for maximum potential with students.

ABSTRACT. Working from the premise that tesimonio can be seen as a curricular act, this paper explore the ways in which over the last four decades, curriculum scholars arguably know more about the theoretical and methodological challenges and possibilities of interrogating and representing curricular narrativities. Yet such work offers less guarantees —fewer scholarly, pedagogical,and professional promises than ever. Or does it?

ABSTRACT. Drawing on phenomenological inquiry and process philosophy, this paper constructs a complex curriculum conversation of self-social-cultural interpretations that emerge from the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, particularly his 1929 book The Aims of Education.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this symposium is to critically engage the study of White identity and whiteness via scholars with substantial intellectual investment and time in the critical study of White identity or White teachers.