Luminous Literacies: Volume 36

Six New Mexican teachers are featured in their own words and classrooms. Using transcribed interviews and classroom photos, each K-12 teacher shares their perspectives about curriculum and pedagogy with a focus on the students and content of New Mexico. Common themes include social-emotional learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, critical and embedded literacy, place-based curriculum, and teaching for New Mexican Indigenous and Hispanic populations.

This chapter describes a teacher education initiative for in-service teachers from around the United States focused on engagement with historical sites in New Mexico. The initiative invited professional educators to reconceptualize and “re-read” the history of the United States by studying the history of culture of Santa Fe and surrounding communities. This chapter will include an overview of place-conscious education. Additionally, it will advance three place orientations that are rooted in New Mexico history and culture: querencia, contested homelands, and sites as layered, storied texts. The chapter will also include an overview of the history of New Mexico that informed the professional development including a description of three historic sites that exemplify New Mexico's place orientations. Finally, the chapter will discuss qualities of the professional development experience itself with key insights gained from the participants around the place orientations identified in the chapter.

As a novice teacher, I often journaled about my experiences with the complexities and nuances of teaching pedagogy, administrative conflicts, failure to fit it, and difficulty with student engagement. My writing served as an anchor as I continued to develop, learn, and teach in my own classroom. After my first year in the classroom, I was not sure if I would return due to political and bureaucratic complaints that I had formed over a year working full time in the education system. I felt voiceless, as if my identity as an educator was being erased. When I made the transition to public school in my second year as an English Language Development teacher, I struggled with the same voicelessness I had at the beginning of my career. So, I flipped everything I knew about teaching and engagement and tossed the lesson plan out of the window and shared power with my students. The process of writing and actively engaging with lived experience was something I began to teach my own students and to instill in them as they became advocates and storytellers of their own. This is their story.

This chapter provides a first-person account of the conceptualization and development of a new academic department at a large university in the American Southwest. It includes a description of the conditions that caused the new department to come into being, a discussion of debates surrounding the name and identity of the new department and a delineation of the context – political, social, and demographic – from which the department emerged. The chapter also includes reflections from former doctoral students on how the department's structure and focus influenced their professional identities and careers. The chapter is framed as one educator's story, in the tradition of “teacher stories” that emerged in the late twentieth century.

This chapter centers the investigation and findings of a participatory action research (PAR) study designed and implemented by four language arts teachers in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Using collaborative inquiry as a means of interrogating personal text selection practices for diverse groups of Albuquerque students, the teachers involved in this study came to understand their text selection as an ongoing struggle among historical traditions in the teaching of English, current critical perspectives within that field, and their own early experiences with literature. The findings of this PAR study emphasize the importance of using community-based research as a means of exercising teacher intellectual autonomy as well as the responsibility of practicing language arts teachers to investigate and reflect on text selection.

In the process of obtaining my degree in the Dual License Program at the University of New Mexico, I have been asked numerous times to reflect on past educational experiences so I may then relate those experiences to my teaching style in the classroom. Reflecting on these positive and negative experiences, I was able to focus on which experiences I can replicate or revise to provide the most meaningful experiences for my students. Having chosen English language arts as my concentration field for teaching, I have focused primarily on how I can use my former experiences in past English classes to create positive educational experiences for my students. This process included reflecting on books that mattered to me, books I saw myself in, and then creating similar literacy experiences for my future students and how I can turn those experiences into a culturally relevant teaching pedagogy.

This chapter reflects on the author's unexpected responses to Young Adult (YA) literature as a cathartic and healing experience. It also focuses on the role of YA literature in reaching the emotional needs of both students and educators as they face their own buried trauma. It is necessary for educators to understand the role trauma plays in the classroom and to develop ways to broach these difficult subjects within a structured lesson to support the development of student resilience. Additionally, it is necessary for educators to challenge their own beliefs surrounding the selection of appropriate texts for classroom use and select texts that reflect student experiences. Through this chapter, the reader will gain practical ways to embrace YA literature in the classroom, as well as practical ways to grow through difficult life experiences and healthy methods to foster resilience in educational spaces.

New Mexico (NM) students live complex intersectional lives; thus, drama is a tool that grants students the keys to understanding social justice, resistance, and, most importantly, healing. For drama to be used as a social justice tool, elements of the outside world need to be brought into the classroom. The following uses Teatro Campesino as a radical educational framework that recenters the lost voices of NM students. The intersectional nature of NM students presents a unique opportunity for teachers where drama and Teatro Campesino thrive as its aides in dismantling the education system as a way to provide more equity in the classroom. The classroom space should celebrate and discuss all social locations and struggles. But the space has been hostile, and taboo subjects such as mental health and suicide are supposed to be left at the door, but this is not possible. Using drama, specifically as a learning tool and aspect of the classroom grants students the opportunity to learn more about themselves and others through a safe space. NM youth are susceptible to a lot, including, but not limited to historical trauma, high levels of stress, and a variety of commitments that extend well beyond the classroom. Because of these added aspects of student life, being a K–12 student in New Mexico is different from where the majority of the curriculum comes from. Thus, using Teatro Campesino and the musical Dear Evan Hansen is not only appropriate to bring into the classroom but also critical for equity to prevail.

In this chapter, I share my journey and implementation of a critical literacy framework through dramatic play into my classroom and how it has transformed my teaching. Critical literacy is a field that addresses imbalances of power and, in particular, pays attention to the voices of those who are less frequently heard. When critical literacy is implemented as a curriculum in the classroom, students are made aware of injustices and provided a platform to learn about them in their community and their world. In this space, students can interrogate injustices, develop their voice, feel empowered, and participate in a humanitarian approach of learning in a safe and nonjudgmental environment. As student's start to feel empowered and develop a critical stance, the final and most rewarding step in a critical literacy framework is providing necessary steps to improve conditions and be compassionate to differences and injustices.

We need a locally relevant curriculum because it is engaging and leverages community knowledge strengths. However, new teachers are not always aware of the resources available to make a locally relevant curriculum. Here in New Mexico, Los Alamos is a location with many resources detailing its purpose and existence. These resources coupled with so much notoriety inside and outside the state make Los Alamos a place that lends itself to culturally relevant instruction. Specifically, graphic novels provide a unique medium for students and teachers alike to start learning about the city that started the Atomic Age: Los Alamos and begin applying that knowledge more broadly. I, being a student and a teacher from New Mexico, offer my own understanding of a locally relevant curriculum utilizing three graphic novels about Los Alamos, its people, and its stories.

This chapter describes the curriculum for one nine-week unit called “The United States of America and Native America.” This unit was part of a two-year course for students in grades 11 and 12 at a small, independent school in the Southwest. The school began as a US government–sponsored boarding school in the nineteenth century, tasked with assimilating Indigenous children into white US culture. Over the past century the school's mission has evolved significantly. During the nineteenth century, efforts were made to locate and recruit students in far-flung rural (mostly Hispanic) communities in New Mexico without access to a local high school. This effort has since expanded to offering a college preparatory education to local populations, who are less likely to enjoy private school or college educations, and to international students. This chapter gathers research about “decolonizing education” (Brayboy & Lomawaima, 2018; Jacob, 2018; Fryberg & Markus, 2007; and Deyhle & Swisher, 1997; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014) and considers the extent to which the curriculum is effective for students who identify as Indigenous.

This chapter looks at the presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, plus (LGBTQIA+) literacy practices in New Mexico schools, primarily Albuquerque Public Schools. When finding rates of homelessness, suicide, and mental illness to be high in New Mexico, the author tackles the question of what teachers can do in their spaces to be inclusive and supportive. The author analyzes what is present and what is missing. Through citing organizations GLSEN, The Trevor Project, and Equality New Mexico, the author suggests minor and major ways to make change in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. The suggestions include adding LGBTQIA+ history to the curriculum, creating safe spaces for preferred pronouns, and reading LGBTQIA+ literature and legislature.

This chapter documents a commitment to culturally responsive teaching through the implementation of multimodal text sets in English language arts teacher education. Using a communities of inquiry framework inspired by justice-driven approaches to literacy learning, preservice teachers at New Mexico State University designed curriculum and instruction that considered the importance of students' digital literacies to meaning-making and communication. Through the presentation of a course unit that explores how multimodal text sets inspire literacy learning that is culturally relevant for students whose racial, linguistic, and cultural identities are often absent in mainstream school curricula, this chapter highlights the notion that digital literacies are accessible to and supportive of the minority serving educational institutions of New Mexico. Preservice teachers first considered what topics sparked their curiosity or inspired them to step into learning before exploring topics to which their future students will be drawn to investigate in language arts. Integrating two frameworks for creating text sets, preservice teachers then selected a targeted, canonical text around which to build their sets and supported it with multimodal scaffolding texts. Following the work and reflections of one focal student, this chapter offers unit descriptions, snapshots, and implications of personalized literacy experiences with creating inquiry-based, multimodal text sets in a secondary methods course.

This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities of using multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodality in a nontraditional English language arts classroom. The paper highlights the dynamic and contemporary nature of the multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodal literacy practices proposed by the New London Group (1996). This paper makes connections through the analysis of scholarship and practice and provides solutions for educators to promote learning that is meaningful, engaging, and relevant to students. The focus is on promoting literacy instruction that values students' creativity, language, and culture to cultivate analysis, inquiry, and agency.

In this five-week study, two teacher educators and one preservice teacher brought console and virtual reality games into an elective middle school language arts course in order to explore aspects of literacy as a social practice. To the extent possible in a public school, researchers sought to construct the classroom as an affinity space, treat the games as literature worthy of thoughtful response, and position students as co-investigators. Small groups of students played games and reflected on their experiences in writing, class discussion, and a culminating interview. The evolving discourse was framed with questions designed to evoke student explanations of their thinking related to their play experiences. Thematic analysis of student writing, researcher field notes, artifacts from large group meetings, and final interviews revealed the importance of community to the gamers' progress in the game and to their well-being in the classroom.

Engaging in activism and sustaining the self at a research university with a diverse student body is no simple task. From marching at Edmund Pettus Bridge as part of engaging in the Bridge Jubilee to the New Mexico Latino Education Task Force, Rick has invested much in activism as a scholar, even as such activities go unrecognized and unrewarded in the academy. In this chapter, Rick discusses his long career standing up for families and children in New Mexico and the origins of that work. He presents the roots of his activism in his life as a white Jewish male in a progressive family that demanded thoughtfulness and action. Starting at 14 years old with involvement with the movement to protect Soviet Jewish refugees to gaining conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, Rick soon found that education and activism are not often overlapping spheres, but in his work with young children and eventually teachers, students, and families, he found ways to make sure they did.

Indigenous education in New Mexico has a long and disappointing history, but with current movements in the reformation of a more equitable system, there is hope for a constitutionally sound and appropriate education for New Mexico's students. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historical overview of the New Mexico Indian Education Act of 2003 and examine the scope of this state legislation in the 2018 court decision in Yazzie/Martinez vs. the State of New Mexico. This court ruling has directly affected schools and students in New Mexico. Specifically, there are legal and operational ramifications to school districts and implications for curricular and classroom decisions that address inequities in public education for vulnerable student populations. To provide context, I share my testimony as a witness in the legal proceedings. I also argue that curricular development opportunities in critical literacy and critical awareness for education practitioners will prove to be important responses to the findings of the lawsuit. I share findings from qualitative research on the implementation of the New Mexico Indian Education Act prior to the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit and the resulting changes to the legislation resulting from the court findings.