Children's Testimony and the Necessity of Critical Witness in Urban Classrooms

Borders and Intersections of Possibility: Multilingual Repertoires of Refugee Families in the Southwest U.S.

“…The Latina Feminist Group (2001) described testimonios "as a form of expression that comes out of intense repression or struggle, where the person bearing witness tells the story to someone else, who then transcribes, edits, translates, and publishes the text elsewhere" (p. 13). The concept of testimonios in the classroom has been explored primarily with Latina/o students intra-culturally (see, for example, Dutro, 2009;Saavedra, 2011) In this way, testimonios have both oral and written roots and have developed into a powerful literary genre. With care and respect for their origins, labor histories, testimonios, and stories of survival can be appropriated for new purposes in the classroom.…”

Momentos de Cambio: Cultivating Bilingual Students’ Epistemic Privilege through Memoir and Testimonio

“…(Beverley, 2000, p. 558) The audience is considered a witness, hearing evidence that cannot be ignored. Alarcón, Cruz, Jackson, Prieto, and Rodriguez-Arroyo (2011) This explosion toward the other leads to what has been referred to as "critical witnessing" (Dutro, 2009). Later in this article we describe students' critical witnessing.…”

“…DeNicolo and González (2015), for example, examined Latina/o emergent bilingual students' use of testimonio during a writing unit to counter deficit assumptions. Similarly, Dutro (2009) explains that critical witnessing in classrooms can facilitate both attending closely to children's everyday testimonies while also consciously noticing and resisting deficit discourses of historically marginalized students and families. Later we describe how we and Patricia's students made this happen and the tensions we faced along the way.…”

“…The other students listened closely to Chicharito's every word, and when he was done, two students suggested that he had had a moment of change. In other words, what became a tool for interpretive authority also became a tool for reciprocal and critical witnessing (Dutro, 2009;Park-Fuller, 2009;Weiglhofer, 2014).…”

“…Testimonios have been used among Latina/o scholars (Alarcón et al, 2011), in teacher development (González et al, 2003), and in classrooms, including at the elementary level (DeNicolo & González, 2015;Dutro, 2009;Saavedra, 2011). DeNicolo and González (2015), for example, examined Latina/o emergent bilingual students' use of testimonio during a writing unit to counter deficit assumptions.…”