Reclaiming our stories Con Pláticas y Fotos: Pláticas as pedagogy in K-12 history classrooms

Abstract

This article documents the process I, as a teacher educator at UCLA’s History Geography Project, went through to develop my lesson for centering Salvi history, “Reclaiming Our Stories Con Pláticas y Fotos: Pláticas as Pedagogy In K-12 History Classrooms.” Inspired by the scholarship of feminist women of color who have shaped and informed my teaching practice and my views on the purpose of history education, I make the case for why Salvi communities in Los Angeles need a lesson like this to intervene in the erasures of Salvi communities in the history-social science framework for California public schools. These overt silences that I, and an entire generation of Salvi students, have faced at home and in school motivated this lesson, in which I use pláticas as pedagogy in an effort to move towards healing in our community. Specifically, I narrate how my lesson draws on the five principles outlined in the Chicana/Latina feminist plática methodology as well as the ways my lesson aimed to meet the specific needs of my Salvi community and history instruction. I conclude by reflecting on how I made this lesson accessible to educators through various professional developments and reflect on the process of working with educators.

Keywords:

• Plática
• Salvi
• Guanaca
• culturally responsive pedagogy
• K-12 History Instruction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use Salvi intentionally (as opposed to Salvadorean or Salvadoran) to refer distinctly to Salvadoreñx people. Salvi captures what the other terms cannot. First, Salvi reclaims the term from the academic valences of Salvadoran. I embrace the colloquial tone of Salvi in part to push back against academic spaces that attempt to classify Salvi people. In making my writing more accessible and inviting to folks outside of the academy, I am fulfilling part of my role as a curandera historian.

2 See Brooks (2020) for a discussion of this lesson and the actual lesson plan.

3 Much like the term Salvi, I use the term Guanacx in this article to also refer distinctly to Salvadoreñx people. This is an endearing term used within the Salvi community. Using this term is a way of showing love to my community.

4 I conceptualize family broadly as chosen people, by which I mean people who I love and are important in my life; in this sense, family extends beyond strictly biological ties. Additionally, when students do not have access to physical photographs, I remind them digital photographs (on their phones, for example) are acceptable, too. For those who do not have any photographs, I encourage them to identify and use any artifact that might elicit a memory.

5 For a more in-depth discussion of the ways in which the Salvadoran government—one of the mediators of the national historical narrative of El Salvador—continues to silence any histories of the Salvadoran civil war, see Sierra Becerra (2016).

6 See California Department of Education (1998) for the History-Social Science content standards. See California Department of Education (2016) for the History-Social Science framework.

7 For more on culturally sustaining pedagogies, see Paris and Alim (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cindy Mata-Villalta

Cindy Mata-Villalta is an immigrant from El Salvador. She is a former secondary history educator and the current Associate Director of the UCLA History Geography Project.