“I’ll find a way to make my voice heard:” Transformational literacies of Latinx students

Carvajal Regidor, Maria Paz

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Description

Title

“I’ll find a way to make my voice heard:” Transformational literacies of Latinx students

Author(s)

Carvajal Regidor, Maria Paz

Issue Date

2021-04-18

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Prior, Paul A

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Prior, Paul A

Committee Member(s)

• Ritter, Kelly
• Russell, Lindsay R
• Pacheco, Mark

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Latinx students
• Latinas
• Latina students
• La Casa Cultural Latina
• literacies
• language
• writing
• race
• writing instruction

Abstract

The number of Latinx students enrolling in U.S colleges and universities has increased over the last few years (Gramlich, 2017), despite the fact that institutions of higher education, especially those that are historically white, remain difficult and hostile spaces for Latinx, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and students of color (Patton, 2010; Patton, 2016; Yosso and Benavidez, 2010; Yosso, 2016). At the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where this project takes place, just over ten percent of the student population identifies as Hispanic (the institution’s designation). Yet, Latinx students and their literacies and language remain understudied in writing studies. Through critical race theory and a combination of archival and ethnographic methods, this dissertation contributes to our understandings of how Latinx students navigate higher education and how these experiences intersect with their literacies and language. This project recovers and recenters Latinx students’ activism on campus, demonstrating how they have historically leveraged their diverse ways of knowing and being to create change at UIUC. In particular, it emphasizes the historical and contemporary roles of extra-curricular, public writing that Latinx students engage in, often through La Casa Cultural Latina, providing concrete examples of how Latinx students use their writing in transformative ways. In addition to exploring public writing, this work sheds light on how Latinas utilize Spanish in curricular writing and how they navigate traumatic educational experiences related to writing, literacies, and language. This research provides a deep dive into Latinx students’ experiences in higher education and with writing and some of their successes and challenges. Findings suggest the need to continue to think critically about how research with and for Latinx students is conducted and for more socially and racially just practices in the teaching of writing and in literacy education.

Graduation Semester

2021-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 María Paz Carvajal Regidor

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