"Education without Boundaries": Literacy Pedagogies and Human Rights

Late one weekday evening, the five of us [Gerald, Maria Paula, Alicia, Grace, and Emily] as members of a university-based research team gathered with families and youth from St. Frances Cabrini, a multiethnic and multilingual parish, for a meeting of the "Educational Access Inquiry Group." We had been coming together to engage in participatory research, a project that grew out of our now six-year university-community partnership. The multilingual inquiry group brought together families from different backgrounds- Vietnamese, Latina/o, Filipina/o, Indonesian, and African American-and across generations to better understand the issues community members face in advocating for and participating in their children's education, as well as the cultural and linguistic strengths they draw on in their efforts.1 The group was interested in both exploring and enacting how people can cooperate across social and institutional boundaries toward a vision of educational justice.During the meeting, Angela (all names of participants are pseudonyms), a Latina mother, described the barriers she had experienced in not being able to help her son with his homework, and called his transition to an English-Only classroom "traumatic." She communicated to the group the need for educational change that would allow him and his peers to participate in after-school classes and fieldtrips and obtain academic support that valued multilingualism. As she spoke, she expressed urgency that "todos sean tratados igual" [everyone be treated the same], since both she and her children had experienced racism in school. Angela noted that immigrant students, including those with undocumented status or from mixed-status families, face many barriers that "estan apagando sus suenos" [are extinguishing their dreams].Gerald, who was facilitating the discussion, reiterated these ideas, underscoring both Angela's agency in seeking out supports and the difficulties she continued to experience: "But here's the thing Angela is worried about. She's worried about the barriers to immigrants . . . that some students may lose their dreams to get an education." The words lingered in the room until Lynette, an elder and a leader in the Concerned Black Catholics, broke the silence, saying, "And that's where we come in." Her words conveyed a sense of community support and solidarity that had been a theme in our inquiry group. When Gerald commented that this evening's meeting, focused on the struggles and obstacles within the education system, could feel a bit depressing, 14-year-old Regina, a youth from the Indonesian community, whispered, "It's not depressing; it's what we are fighting for."In a world characterized by mass migration and increasing inequities, the issues brought up in the inquiry group are pressing, both for the families impacted and for educators trying to create learning spaces that are sensitive to these social and political dynamics. We write this column during an international refugee crisis, record deportations in the United States splitting up families, and a political season characterized by a xenophobic rhetoric rearing its ugly head again (e.g., MacNeal, 2015). The divisive language prevalent in the dominant public sphere dehumanizes immigrants and people of color, who are too often scapegoated as a "threat" to the nation, and obscures both community needs and the organizing of families in advocating for their children's education.Over the course of our time together, members of the Educational Access Inquiry Group have challenged such framings, which too often pit the success of one group against the wellbeing of another. Instead, through testimonials of their experiences- individual narratives that reflect group histories of oppression and resistance (e.g., Saavedra, 2011)- the participants have developed awareness of and empathy for the systemic obstacles they each face, and have identified commonalities and possible ways forward. One of the promises exemplified by the inquiry group is how, amid anti-immigration sentiments and racism, people can cooperate across boundaries toward a collective vision of educational justice and human rights. …