Content area
The long-term existence of K through higher education programs and their discourses of inclusive diversity have not closed the achievement gap of minority students. Some minority students manage to ascend academically and this study examines the emergence of spaces for agency within the context of academic success. A historical framework of external (Puerto Rico) and internal (U.S.) colonialism is used to analyze the politics of academic achievement. La Asociación Latina Alcanzando Sueños (ALAS), a 12-year dual language program and its engaged research practices with the Academy of the Americas (Detroit), and Pipiolo Elementary (Mexico) supported by the American Go Foundation, are analyzed as a transnational community-based effort to discover ruptures that permit achievement.
This research uses home ethnography and critical intersubjectively engaged methods. Home ethnography uses the researcher as principal informant in her academic communities. Intersubjectively-engaged methods involves the exchange of experiences, feelings and ideas among research participants. Freirean educational, postcolonial and feminist theories are used to stress a critical awareness that leads to social action. The interweaving of participant and authorial voices in the analysis is used to neutralize power imbalances.
The findings reveal that a critical intersubjectively-engaged research extends the agency of participants from a limited to a systemic understanding of educational oppression. In this process of inclusion, subjugating discourses (e.g. No Child Left Behind Act and discourses on Diversity), which appear to be emancipatory, are demystified. The development of critical awareness among community interviewers and the possibility for action and transnational network formation are examined. A central contribution of this study is understanding the emancipatory power of the participant voices, which through their interwoven presence disrupt my own authorial power and our complicitous hegemonic discourses of oppression.
The study recommends that engaged anthropology, emancipatory social work and universities prioritize a critical education infused with praxis at all levels beginning in their institutional homes. The study further suggests overcoming overly simplistic binary oppositions that are used to marginalize large segments of our population and other potentially emancipatory disciplines. Long-term mentorship and cultural validation are central to this transformative process.