This workshop will explore how cultural communities, especially of Latina/o/x ancestry, construct meaning around such concepts as familia and comunidad, especially how knowledge and learning is produced in these contexts.
Familia and comunidad-based saberes, in this workshop refers to complex “knowings” or “understandings” of the world, tied to familia and comunidad knowledge(s), but also encompassing larger social, natural, and spiritual well-being. The goal of the workshop is to help educators understand how familia and comunidad must be understood as verbs in schools and in classroom life in order to better leverage the cultural and linguistic knowledge possessed by minoritized communities and form authentic relationships with their families and communities.This workshop will be divided into three parts:
The workshop will begin by exploring basic concepts in identity formation, as well as familia and comunidad-based saberes. This part of the workshop will also introduce the Indigenous concept of “comunalidad.” Comunalidad (or communality) is the basis for organizing community life in Indigenous pueblos in Mesoamerica and the practices of comunalidad endure in Latinx communities in the US.
The second part of the workshop will revisit the impediments to authentic familia and comunidad-based relations in schools, especially with minoritized communities.
The final part of the workshop will focus on how critically conscious educators can challenge the static, individualistic social and cultural conceptions that are prevalent in institutional whitestream school and classroom settings.