centering embodiment, affect, and emotion through aesthetic
In Western Modern Science (Strong, 2021; McKittrick, 2014; Wynter, 2003), and the colonial models of schooling - logic and rational thinking value everything from the “neck up” (meenadchi, 2021). Part of decolonizing our thinking is to embrace embodiment and other, equally valuable ways of knowing (Anzaldúa, 1981). Recounting the experiences and conversations of the WOCArchive events, I remember the questions:
“What’s bubbling up to the surface through this experience?”;
“Where do you feel it in/on your body?”
Through this question and by prompting users to describe what emotions came up and what resonated most when using the video annotation tool, we are recentering a decolonial and feminist[1] that our emotions are knowledge and that we value them in this space, and by extension, in education. When we ask a public audience to watch primer país via VideoAnt and annotate for affect, we are asking to pay better attention to other ways emotions are coming up on your body and to center a somatic experience. Because we’ve suppressed these emotions so much, and prioritized so-called logic and reason, we have a hard time listening and naming the emotions that come up. I include this list of emotions (above) not to be limiting to what one might feel or experience, but rather, to give shared language to experiences that are hard to name and how this is related to Ethnic Studies pedagogy.
creating the kitchen table intergenerational space through art
My educational milestones have origins in the kitchen. The family stories I learned from my tias and the endless advice my mom gave me were always moments when we cooked and ate together. Making tamales during the holidays meant that we could catch a few lessons from abuelita through her stories, her cooking methods, and the power of cultural traditions. These lessons in the kitchen taught me to discern which banana leaves were good enough to use for wrapping the masa, the best methods to clean rice, and when roasting peppers, that they are nearly ready when your lungs are filled, and you begin to cough. These small moments of learning happen when there is an openness of space, when we’re united by community, and when members of all ages are invited to the community to build/learn together. That communal ethos is what I wanted to bring to my classroom and to my students, and what we built across the WOCArchive project and legacy. We miss opportunities when we are unable to bring our communities and histories into our learning space, and this piece is about how the praxis of this project is rooted in both an Ethnic Studies that honors and includes our families and ancestral knowledges, as well as, an invitation of creativity through art, mixed media, and technology. This preservation and creation of creative ways to hold knowledge has long been the backbone of how we survive and thrive.
Intergenerational gatherings, oral traditions, and the adage of each one teach one, have long been in the fabric of our Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) communities. Through these spaces, we learn how to make abuelita’s recipe of shála - a local green mole made of pumpkin seeds native to Veracruz, hear stories of ancestors we were never able to meet, and even learn the significance of the burnt rice, concón, at the bottom of the pot of rice. It is through these spaces that learning, beyond culture or texts, happens. It is through this space that I learn about my history, my culture, my language, and where I too, am able to impart knowledge on my community. This is an integral part of how we build Ethnic Studies and creative pedagogy.
Surrounded by babies and children running around with several generations of women around me, I wonder - how do I bring this ethos into my classroom? In reflecting on these spaces of joy and learning, I wonder: how do we bring the power and significance of these spaces to K-12 schools? What could that look like? Or, is it about bringing schools to these intergenerational family and home spaces? Building upon the WOCArchive classroom pedagogy and project creation, we continued expanding upon the possibilities of Ethnic Studies by utilizing an array of public/private/family venues. Through an exploration and creation of art exhibitions, digital storytelling tools, and free accessible spaces, we, a group of educators and Ethnic Studies students, co-curated spaces of joy to invite community members to be featured in our classroom curriculum, and to learn from our culminating projects. With our commitment to these tenets as described earlier in the project: (1) the importance of recording peoples' stories and preserving them (e.g., archiving and oral histories); (2) curating experiential intergenerational spaces and (3) centering art-based methods across disciplines – we theorized how this might look across varied other contexts. Said another way, we came up with a few answers to: what could it look like when you put those three tenets together within the Ethnic Studies classroom? How does this approach also apply to educators in other disciplines?
What follows below explores the knowledge gained from producing experiential and intergenerational space, how creating an experience and a space within curriculum for students in community (e.g., with public audience, family, and how we cultivate students as complex people) re-emerges the idea that knowledge isn’t only created by schools, and that it isn’t only useful for schooling. This pedagogical approach and the use of visual testimonios underscores that there are multiple entry-points for students and their respective communities in the schooling process and as archivists. We can create an environment in which Ethnic Studies is actively relational with those in the school community.
praxis: archives & art as community & action
As outlined in detail in lavanda // lavender, the WOCArchive is an intergenerational digital storytelling project seeking to preserve, document, and amplify the stories of our matriarchs of color. Grounded in a feminist tradition inspired by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa, we seek to showcase our lived experiences as legitimate forms of knowledge and to encourage our community to share their lived experiences. As a project in an Ethnic Studies classroom, we build upon foundations that center collectivity in our knowledges. The ARC of Ethnic Studies is grounded in: Access, Relevance, and Community (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015). Thus, our Ethnic Studies praxis means we ensure our knowledge is shared beyond the physical confines of a classroom and in turn, we expand our definition of what a classroom is. Through a re-envisioning of our “classroom” and a determination to center intergenerational community, we created multiple opportunities for our community to engage with our projects and curriculum through the following platforms: (1) an end of year art gallery hosted by a Black-owned business featuring stop motion oral history collages, aka visual testimonios, from matriarchs in our community; (2) digital opportunities to share matriarchs’ stories via Instagram, collage workshops over Zoom, and Padlet; and (3) a public art exhibition hosted by the annual Photoville Festival at Brooklyn Bridge Park - curated by me and a high school student. Below is our abstract for our award-winning exhibit dándoles sus flores // giving them their flowers featured at Photoville’s 10th annual festival in September of 2021.
par-chiving
Participatory methods (i.e., the inclusion of students’ families as part of the research process and the centralized role community played in the events where we continued to make sense of the oral histories) are part of my praxis because of their deep connection to the tenets of Ethnic Studies. In the ARC of Ethnic Studies, as defined in amapola // poppy, the ‘C’ stands for community ( Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015) Through this tenet, community is seen as a place and space that is both part of your curriculum and a part of your learning. As Ethnic Studies scholars, practitioners, and students, we believe we must also share what we learn in these formalized spaces with our broader community. One way that we uphold this tenet is through our use of accessible projects that are public facing and participatory, inviting community into the learning space. The community tenet also acknowledges the importance in youth recognizing the power they have (Ayala et al. 2018; Mayorga, & Rosales, 2019; Torre & Ayala, 2009). According to the NLERAP Collective who authored PAR Entremundos (2019), they furthered an approach we utilized in this project as follows:
PAR EntreMundos as a research approach, epistemology and creation-space that emerges from the inquiry, relationship, and organizing work of multi-generational collectives that are intimately tied to the social justice issue in question, and who attend to power dynamics within and outside the group. What makes this a PAR that is EntreMundos is its assumptions/enactments of multiplicity and bridging, residing among the in-between spaces of self and other, and the psychological, social, cultural, sexual and structural boundaries we move between daily.” (p.2-3)
As a high school Ethnic Studies teacher and doctoral scholar, I wanted to ensure that all my students’ and my own final assignments had this public facing component, and that students continued their process of analysis and sense-making in this continued sharing. This project is an art-based iteration of a PAR Entremundos endeavor – a project with the aim of forcing Ethnic Studies as a whole, and our high school community as a specific, to recognize the knowledge we bring to the classrooms and can learn from connecting with our raíces and specific histories. The knowledge about histories of our communities (for example, women of historical significance in Brooklyn, decolonization tours centering the Lenni Lenape) and arts media we were learning (see below for some of the feminist artists of color whose work we studied in class), and in turn creating, in our classroom wasn’t just for us - it was iteratively relational and needed to live in our broader communities. As a class, we didn’t come from or identify with a single community, even in our shared experiences and backgrounds – but we were able to create a space from our collectivity that further built and centered an intergenerational connection and “bridge” across various forms of community. From the initial project of a writer’s cafe, where we transformed our classroom into an open mic space for students to perform testimonios of their experiences with their racial and gender identity, to the final version of this dissertation on Manifold - an open-access digital platform with multiple entry points for audience participation - and everything that continues to live on from the WOCArchive - it exists because I am determined to show how a classroom and knowledge can be open beyond the school building. I am determined to show how knowledge stems from and includes our broader community and how in schools, we need to invite them in.
This is part of a praxis of building new knowledge in community and connecting it to a classroom. Like other CRT and Ethnic Studies scholars (Crenshaw, 1989; de los Ríos & Molina, 2020) and/or those scholars who write about Culturally Sustaining/Responsive Pedagogy (for example, Paris & Alim; Bettina Love; Ladson-Billings; Delpit), we don’t exclude “rigor,” but instead redefine what we prioritize as important with respect to student growth and development. By creating and designing these projects, we disrupt paywalls, literal gated and policed physical spaces, disconnected curriculum content, and thus ensure that community needs are addressed through pedagogy.
capullos: budding spaces of par-chiving
As the project emerged and transformed, as an educator I was inundated with questions. In all pedagogy and research, where we begin matters – and how we proceed has deep ideological roots. So:
What follows are four categories of examples of the WOCArchive as an active art par-chiving process. They include (1) the creation of the visual testimonios in the classroom space, (2) the wocarchive launch event, (3) the photoville exhibition at Brooklyn Bridge Park, and finally (4) this digital humanities (DH) dissertation (specifically, on manifold).
classroom assignments/ building the visual testimonios
There were several spaces we created that led to the culminating WOCArchive event. The Writer’s Café was the opening experiential space to kickoff the Ethnic Studies course. Students read parts of their final testimonios. We purchased a spotlight online, brought in a wooden plank to create a stage, bought a mic, and curated a café space with light snacks and rearranged chairs. Following this experience, we had an opportunity to host a small art gallery in our classroom. Through this assignment, students were asked to create a visual representation from nayyirah waheed’s book of poems, salt. After reading a series of poems, analyzing them for themes, and writing about their overlap and nuance, students chose one poem that resonated most. The salt. art show was exhibited in our classroom and open to the public via our Instagram account in which we tagged @nayyirah.waheed. She wrote to us on Instagram mentioning about how proud and honored she felt seeing all of the art pieces we had created on her behalf. The knowledge, again, was leaving and entering our classroom through these public art experiences that we always wanted to share with the world.
Instagram screenshot, 2018.
When students were asked to choose a woman in their community that they wanted to feature in their WOCArchive project, we included a requirement to obtain community members approval of their proposal before interviewing this person. Although there is also an approval process for IRB, we envisioned this space and approval process to be centered on community accountability and less on liability. Having our community as part of this process ensured that students fully understood what a privilege it is to tell someone’s story, the gravity of preserving stories in a publicly accessible archive, and that a group of our community members were going to ask questions and hold them accountable if students didn’t seem prepared. Through this process there were many tears, excitement when they were approved, and a formality that felt like this was an honor and privilege to participate in the project.
*Photos here some writing around the various public pieces we’ve done
wocarchive launch & showcase
The largest and most significant event we had was the launch of the WOCA projects. During this event, we hosted our community at a local Black-owned business and set up iPads, with headphones attached, that featured the stop motion collages – a self-curated exhibition of the visual testimonios. The space was modeled after an art gallery and brought in folks from the community that were not familiar with our project. One attendee that night even invited folks from the neighborhood who simply happened to pass by the doors in to join the event – and, to our joy, they joined us. The WOCArchive Launch was not just a “final presentation,” but rather, it became a moment of celebration where various stakeholders in the community came together to celebrate women and youth of color. One of our student’s families ran a local Mexican bakery and donated pastries and tres leches cake, while another person’s cousin DJed the event. But the best part was to see the women who had been interviewed, view and interact with the projects for the first time. This was for them.
The WOCArchive projects interrupt traditional ways of knowing and are a visual representation of what students learned throughout the course. These culminating projects were an act of resistance in the way they were co-created with young people and WOC whose experiences we, the school community at large, find legitimate and worthy of study. The women we interviewed are the experts of their lived experience and we find value in hearing and preserving their stories. Visual testimonios were also research analysis and product - students analyzed the oral history to decide what to include and how to represent themes; also a feminist representation of themes in centering what was most salient and important in the relationality between researcher/subject (in the oral history interview) and created something all can view. Understanding the themes emerged out of the interview without exploiting the trust or vulnerability of sharing the full detailed story.
decolonial practice reference here – or explain what you mean further ↑