Miguel A. Guajardo

The Impact of Brown on the Brown of South Texas: A Micropolitical Perspective on the Education of Mexican Americans in a South Texas Community

This article identifies the Edcouch-Elsa High School Walkout of 1968 as a pivotal event in the educational history of Mexican American students in south Texas. It presents elements of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Brown decision, the rise of Mexican American political organizations, and the actions of community youth. The authors use oral histories that they and their high school students produced between 1997 and 2002, through the work of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, a nonprofit organization founded by the authors and their students. Through the use of secondary literature, local stories, and micro–macro integrative theory, this study describes how the Brown decision and other national events affected Edcouch-Elsa schools between 1954 and 1968.

Reframing the Praxis of School Leadership Preparation through Digital Storytelling.

This article introduces a social innovation that contributes to the formation of educational leaders. Digital storytelling is employed as a process for data creation, analysis, and synthesis. Emerging educational leaders are guided through a process to better understand the experiences and social constructs that inform their identity. Through a dialogical and reflective mode this article employs a students story, where the text of story emerges as the unit of analysis as it is embedded into the text as primary data. Technology complements the storytelling process to construct a digitalstory of self as the student embarks in a leadership program.

Youth voice and the Llano Grande Center

The Llano Grande Center for Research and Development (LGC) was initially invited to respond to the articles in this volume because there were no ‘youth voices’ in this special edition, one ostensibly about ‘youth voices’. The Llano Grande Center is a non-profit education and community development organization founded in the mid-1990s by youth and teachers out of a public high school classroom in a rural South Texas (USA) community. The Center was created, in large part, to cultivate youth voices as important elements of curriculum development and teacher training at the local public high school. As youth became active participants in the curriculum building process, they also became researchers in a series of action research initiatives sponsored by the Llano Grande Center, out of the local schools. The youth who lent their energy to the formative stages of the Center are now teachers and cultural workers in the same rural schools and community. These young teachers now cultivate this process of building the new youth voices—a process that also informs the pedagogical programming practices of the Center. One of the significant lessons learned by the Center is that higher education and learning are not linear processes. We have also learned that the insight and fresh ideas youth bring to the work of education are not enough in and of themselves; they also need agency and power. This understanding informs the work of the Center, which is grounded in strong teaching, learning, and leadership development defined by authentic youth and adult partnerships.

An introduction to ecologies of engaged scholarship: stories from activist-academics

This special edition of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, ‘Ecologies of engaged scholarship: stories from activist-academics,’ is a product of a distinct form of peer r...

Eternal vigilance: politics, race, and the struggle for educational equity in a Central Texas Community

Abstract This article documents the emergence of a Mexican-American political consciousness in a Central Texas Community and the efforts to dismantle decades of inequitable, exclusionary educational policies and practices. We take readers into a community on the verge of profound change by exploring primary historical data and situating the voices of community leaders in a historical context. We employ a theory of change framework (RASPPA) to chronicle a community’s response to macro-level societal changes. To understand the need for Mexican-American activism in Central Texas, we providing a survey of literature that chronicles Mexican-American experience in Texas. This is a story about a community realizing its political capacity and leveraging its own agency for change. We take a walk-through history and use place, race, identity and courage to inform a new vision for educational equity.

La Universidad de la Vida: a pedagogy built to last

Abstract This article weaves the life of a Mexican laborer, who with his wife brought his family to the United States and mentored two university professors, as they became activists in their craft. The professors honor their father through a reflective process where they share and make sense of a series of stories that describe their Papi’s experience in La Universidad de la Vida. The narratives speak to ontology of research, the utility of stories, particularly as stories can shape identity, capture critical life moments, and can help us make meaning of lived experiences, a methodology not commonly explored in education research.