Resistance Testimonios for Reclaiming Teaching Instruction and Assessment Practices: Holistic Narratives of Bilingual Latinx Youths’ Knowledge Through Long-Term Relationships

ABSTRACT

This study, informed by Chicana Feminist frameworks, explores bilingual Latinx students’ resistance testimonios pertaining to instruction and assessment. These testimonios transpired through pláticas [familiar gatherings] between adolescent youth and the author, also their former elementary school teacher. This study is contextualized within historical and current ways white supremacy impacts education for bilingual Latinx students. Reviews of the literature show how standardized testing does not always capture a full narrative of bilingual Latinx students’ knowledge. While educators cannot dismantle all the limited ways of assessing students at once, this article adds to the scholarship on how teachers can build long-term relationships to mend these sources of harms. The past relationship, between the students and the author, helped establish plática spaces, where they collectively reflected on the ways instructional and assessment practices hurt or dismissed their communities. In the pláticas, students enriched their sociopolitical consciousness by pushing and pulling each other to share their lives. Assembling their collective testimonios reveals alternatives to understanding what bilingual Latinx students know. Remembering with, listening to, and assembling students’ testimonios collectively over time offers how educators might build longer lasting and broader relationships, for a broader, more expansive holistic understanding of Latinx students’ experiences in school. Educators must collaborate together, as there is a critical opportunity for reclaiming instructiom and assessment practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinx adolescents
• relationships
• Chicana feminist epistemology

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Long-term relationships in this article are defined by multiple years (three to four years+) that passed between the former teacher/author and the student/participants’ formal relationship in the classroom. The former teacher/author moved up with students for four years in elementary school. Then, the former teacher/author maintained contact with many students as they transitioned from elementary to middle and high school. The relationships continue to this day, as the former students are now young working and college-attending adults.

² All names of sites and participants are pseudonyms.

³ School leaders gave me two teaching/assessment options. Either the students could take the third-grade exam in English, assuming they would score lower in third grade and increase scores when taking the test again in fourth grade. Or students could take the test in Spanish, with an assumption their scores would likely drop when taking it in English for the first time in fourth grade, rather than third. The school leadership team trusted and supported my decision to support students’ language development, and honoring their need to take their first standardized test in their native language.