Rudolfo Chávez

Digital Explorations Along the Borderlands: Transfronterizo Youth, Testimonio and Personal Learning Networks

Pedagogical strategies that use technologies for connecting and communicating across differences, provide us with opportunities to disseminate historically excluded voices in academia and in society. The use of new and emerging technologies in and out of classrooms provides students and teachers with tools to craft, narrate, create, and share their lived experiences, life stories, and testimonios in digitized formats. The authors present three digital explorations that focus on technological tools that on the surface may seem simplistic but that carry deep constructs of meaning for the participants involved. These digital explorations focus on the affordances provided to students of all ages by the use of technological tools to demonstrate cultural and linguistic agency and embrace their Community Cultural Wealth in using critical media. The authors hope to signal the need for critical pedagogues to further incorporate digital learning technologies in classrooms.

Cultural Citizenship in Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Challenges for Transformation

Addressing the manifestations (past and present) of the phenomenon Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), the articles in this special issue are interwoven with testimony, historical accounts, policy critique, pedagogical reckonings, and philosophical possibilities. As this phenomenon continues to expand its role on the larger stage of higher education we - as Cultural Citizens in various capacities who labor within and for HSIs - argue for the imperative to historically remember and to re-envision possibilities that the HSI designation can create. It is a call to action not exclusively for Hispanics. This Special Issue is a notice for everyone in education to involve themselves in the HSI message of inclusivity, collectivity, integration, representation, and diversity.