Monarch Mystic Migration

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to mi familia, my husband Javier and our kids, for joining me on this exploratory journey from Geocaching on a dirt road in the southeast corner of Arizona to photographing the ancient Las Labradas Petroglyphs in México. I want to express a sincere thank you to the Arizona Geographic Alliance, the STEMSS CRUISE EL Project, and its director Dr. Karen Guerrero, for supporting me as a curious teacher and guiding me as I work to innovate my teaching and bring the natural world to the child. I want to acknowledge the Indigenous ancestral land where my students at Gilbert Elementary live and learn. Our school is located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the O’odham Jewed, Akimel O’odham (Pima), and Hohokam Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allow us to be here today.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Ana Cecillia Parra

Every teacher shares a part of themselves in the classroom. To truly be present in the classroom, I share aspects of my life related to culture with my students. I grew up in a southern Arizona border town, where I could see the barbed-wire fencing that outlined the U.S./Mexican border. My neighborhood park was the Sonoran Desert, I rode my bike through prickly pear–lined trails behind my house, summer monsoons brought the desert to life with the sweet smell of creosote bush, and the soundtrack of my childhood was the sound of kids playing in the language of their bilingual mother tongue. How does a teacher bottle that up and share it with kids? Well, that’s my story. I search for authentic children’s literature to share, listen to 12-year-old storytellers, and present to students phenomena that spark curiosity. I am currently teaching sixth grade in a dual language program in the heart of Gilbert, Arizona, and I am proud to be part of a program that honors heritage speakers and their families. My growth as a teacher is centered around my heritage and my work with the STEMSS Project, where I gained the skills to integrate geography across the curriculum and design lesson for language learners. Geography is now the lens I use to view and access all content areas. In my STEMSS lessons, I stay connected to what is close and meaningful to students in order to have tangible access to content. For Dia de los Muertos, our school ofrenda is adorned with art contributions from every single student in our school. The most powerful aspect of our celebration is the stories we share of the loved ones who are no longer with us. Our cultural community of wealth is our families; stories of love are vital to our celebration. My work with the Arizona Geographic Alliance showed me how I could use geography as a connecting thread through our learning. The Monarch Mystic Migration lesson is an example of how I learned to connect geography to culture and science.