Making Curriculum from Scratch: Testimonio in an Urban Classroom

Abstract

Testimonio, as a genre of the dispossessed, the migrant, and the queer, is a response to larger discourses of nation-building and has the potential to undermine the larger narratives that often erase and make invisible the expendable and often disposable labor and experiences of immigrants, the working class, African Americans, and others. This essay explores the use of testimonio in urban classrooms in Los Angeles and its use as a mediating tool in critical thinking and community based learning projects. I argue that there is a pedagogy to testimonio that is intersubjective and accessible and that, under certain circumstances, re-centers and revitalizes curriculum in this era of standardization and accountability, a hearkening to social justice movements that begin in education.

Notes

1. Lugones (2003) defines “faithful witnessing” as “providing ways of witnessing faithfully and of conveying meaning against the oppressive grain. To witness faithfully is difficult, given the manyness of worlds of sense related through power so that oppressive and fragmenting meanings saturate many worlds of sense in hard to detect ways. A collaborator witnesses on the side of power, while a faithful witness witnesses against the grain of power, on the side of resistance” (p. 7).

2. Langout explains radical listening this way: “Angela Davis defines “radical” as “grasping things at the root.” Radical listening, therefore, is listening for root ideas that are connected to a structural analysis. This means listening for what is being said and what is left unsaid. It means co-creating a space where what has been rendered invisible can be seen, spoken, and heard. To practice radial listening is to take seriously what is being said and to be in dialogue with the speaker in ways that facilitate a structural, radical analysis” (Personal communication, November 15, 2011).

3. Survivance is a term used by Native scholar Gerald Vizenor (2008) to describe the Native American active sense of presence over historical absence, deracination, and oblivion, an acknowledgement of endurance and creative persistence of life-loving practices under colonialism.

4. Continuations schools are often small schools designed by school districts to help recover credits for students who have left or dropped out of a comprehensive high school.

5. By “compromised social body” I intend to describe the unhealthiness or toxicity of the environment and those who live/work in it, but in particular the body made ill or frail because of environmental and poverty-based issues.