Using Pláticas to Create Healing Spaces for Latinx Preservice Teachers

10:30am-12pm

Presenter: Sanjuana Rodriguez, Associate Professor of Literacy Education

Session Type: Workshop

Topic: Education through the Lifespan

Description

In this session the authors will share their experiences creating a support group for Latinx pre-service teachers in the New Latino South. They will go over how the experiences of these students shaped the group, how Pláticas (Burciaga & Tavares, 2006; Fierros and Delgado Bernal, 2016) was a tool for sharing and for healing, and how institutions could support these kinds of groups. Pláticas permitted the authors to center the experiences of Latinx pre-service teachers as LatCrit “... recognizes that the experiential knowledge of Students of Color are legitimate, appropriate, and critical to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racial subordination in the field of education” (Solorzano and Bernal, 2001, pg. 314). Platicas allowed all participants to start a process of healing central to the success of the group. Finally, authors will ask the participants to re-invent the idea of this group to adapt to their own realities, and explain this reinvention.

Facilitators

Sanjuana Rodriguez

Associate Professor of Literacy Education

Kennesaw State University

Paula Guerra, PH.D. is an Uruguayan native where she taught math to middle and high school students for 5 years. She received her Master and Doctorate in Mathematics Teacher Education from Arizona State University, where she grew interested in issues of social justice and education. Her research interests include teaching math for social justice, mathematics schooling of Latinas, and Latinx pre-and in-service teachers’ experiences.