Ileana Jimenez

Ileana Jimenez:

The multimodality of my dissertation was really informed by my high school students and how they read Black and Latina feminist theory as a way to read themselves, which in the end informed their digital activism and their public pedagogies, both in and beyond school.
My dissertation was about my feminist pedagogies in teaching in the high school English classroom. So what I was trying to do was create a dissertation that reflected the work I was doing as a feminist teacher. And because I couldn't document 26 years in five chapters, what I did was I wrote a three-article dissertation. And in the first section of the three articles I wrote about the critical feminist pedagogies and theories that I drew from as a teacher, mainly Black and Latina feminist theories, intersectionality, and then how I used those theories in the classroom, both as texts in the classroom and theories in the classroom, and also as stances that I took in the classroom.
So feminist stances, transformative justice stances, and how that informed the way I taught and the way I related with students and the text I was teaching as an English teacher. And then in the second and third sections, I was writing essentially about what we see behind us, which is this feminist digital archive of blog posts that my students essentially created over the course of 12 years. And during those 12 years, my students essentially used the feminist theory that we were reading in class to read their sense of self, their identities, their multiple identities, the ways that they were looking at the world, the issues that they cared about. And then they transformed that into these blog posts by taking up issues that they really cared about, for example, sexual harassment or trans identities or election cycles that were going on during the time that they were in high school.
So the archive, well, it's now an archive of blog posts behind me, are essentially all of the digital activism that my students did over those 12 years. And what I tried to do in the dissertation was highlight two different students and their writing on this site. One of them was a young person named Darielle and her exploration of Black trans femme identity. And then in the other piece that I wrote about Lulu, where she's examining how she reads Black feminist theory to speak out about sexual harassment at school. And what I was sitting with a lot of the time was what I perceived as my teaching of theory and how I wanted my students to take up those theories to read their identities and the world around them, and then how they interpreted that work was often similar, but then also different.
And I think that the moments where there were differences or different interpretations of what I was doing as a teacher and what they were doing as students and what they were sitting with in terms of reading theory allowed me to say, wow, my students continue to teach me what feminist pedagogy is, and that it's not always this fixed thing that I have in my mind, that it's always multiple for them and it's multiple for me, and it's not something that I can kind of pin down as one thing, which is when you think about what bell hooks defines as feminist pedagogy, Black feminist pedagogy should be an engagement with theory as a way to engage in self-actualization processes and examining your racial, gender, sexual identities, and the ways in which you also look at your own well-being, your own experiences of trauma, your own educational trajectory, all these things she wants us to unpack.
And that's essentially what my students were doing in the high school English classroom, which was reading theory to move through these processes of self-actualization, which is a lifelong process, like one semester of an elective on women of color feminisms is not going to get you self-actualized, but it's going to start a process and a journey, I hope So Darielle is an incredible sex educator in public schools now in New York City, bringing a super powerful Black trans feminist lens to sex education.
Beautiful, that's like the dream, right? And then Lulu is now an early childhood teacher working at a local school here in New York as well, and she also brings her understanding of gender, of race, of Black feminism to the way that she does her own feminist pedagogy with children. So something that I learned in inviting my students through the writing process, part of what I did was I would invite them to read their blog post aloud without my offering any interpretation of what they had written when they were in high school, because for me it wasn't just about a blog post, it was about how were they transforming reading theory in the classroom to understand this moment and multiple moments in their lives as high school students, and then writing about something really urgent for them. And for many of these students, it was like something as pressing and dangerous as sexual violence or something as powerful and emerging as a gender identity or a political identity even.
It was about writing about emerging identities, writing about emerging critical consciousness, writing about emerging critical thinking around who they were at that moment and who they also were in the process of becoming. I'll tell you the story of how I came to writing a three-article dissertation because I had had an entire career as a high school English teacher, I came to TC with a bit of a vision of what I wanted to write about, which was I wanted to write about my critical feminist pedagogies, and I wanted the digital archive to be a part of that work. I came to TC with that idea. I knew that I wanted to use the site as part of my dissertation, but what I learned was that I wasn't going to be able to write about the entire site. I was going to have to be selective.
And through the process of entering my doctoral journey, what I noticed about where the hotspots were in the site itself, where I kept returning to, I kept returning to the blog posts about sexual harassment, mainly because I had just spent two years doing school-based activism on young people's experiences of sexual harassment at school, and so it was still really fresh and urgent for me. And so I kept returning to those posts in particular. And then I also wanted to write about and trans students in my classes. And so I turned back to Darielle and her post about reading Black feminism to read her Black trans identity. So those things were the most urgent pieces to write about first. So that's what I was trying to do, I was really trying to write that as a narrative inquiry of, how do young people do this work?
How do they take up these theories? How do they read themselves and the world around them? And then how do I as a teacher also engage in certain pedagogies that create the conditions to read theory in the classroom? So one of the things that I experienced during writing my dissertation was that I really resisted some of the more traditional social science ways of writing research. And because I spent so much time as a high school English teacher, I really wanted to write my dissertation as story. And I think that's why I often bucked up against all of these details that I really wanted to write. And so I try to use methodologies that would allow me as much as possible to write in a narrative approach and also with narrative feeling. And so in the piece about Darielle, I chose one specific methodology, which was not only portraiture, but mujerista portraiture, which allowed me to use Latina feminisms. It allowed me to engage with trans feminisms. It allowed me to also write about both of us together as teacher and student.
It allowed me to return to not only a digital archive, but the archive of all of her free writing, all of her pieces of art that she might've created in the classroom as a 10th grader and 11th grader, 12th. It was a whole archive of work I was looking at. And by the time she wrote this blog post, she was a junior, senior in high school, but I was looking at her more holistically as an emerging Black trans feminist, as an emerging Afro-Latinx trans feminist, and how she was taking that up. And so for me, portraiture in one slice of the dissertation allowed me to create not only just one portrait, but this multiple portraits of what she was doing in high school.
I was trying to put together all these fragments, the digital writing, her talking about Black trans feminist history on the stage as she was doing an assembly and teaching her peers about trans activism. So I tried to really piece together this narrative portrait. And then in the third piece about Lulu and Me Too activism, I decided to take up Sara Ahmed's idea of feminist pedagogy of complaint. And her idea that when young people and students in general, particularly young women, complain about sexual violence, what they wind up coming up against is wall after wall after wall. And it could be the silencing wall of, we don't want to hear about your experience with harassment. We don't want to actually look at your report. We're actually going to retaliate against you and punish you for speaking out about sexual violence. And so I use this idea of complaint and what Sara Ahmed calls complaint biography to write Lulu's experience of not only the digital activism, but her experience of sexual harassment at school and how she wrote this digital blog post as a testimony of her experience of sexual harassment.
I tried every entryway to write through a narrative inquiry form so that I could tell the story of my students, I could tell the story of feminist pedagogy, and I could tell the story of being a feminist teacher alongside my students. And so I refused to write it in my lit review as a traditional lit review because I wanted to write the story of how it was making me not only feel, but how it was informing my understanding of myself as a feminist teacher, which is that teachers don't get access to research. And unless you're at a school that has a database, you're not reading research. And so coming to Teachers College and engaging in research, it only made sense for me to write my lit review as a form of telling my own story of becoming a feminist teacher from the time I was 22, coming out of a woman's college and coming to this epiphany that I really wanted to do feminist teaching as a high school English teacher.
And writing that whole trajectory and then inserting and weaving into the story of my feminist teaching life, all the literature that was out there on feminist pedagogy, particularly feminist pedagogy that was like Black feminist pedagogy, Latina feminist pedagogy, women of color feminist pedagogy, intersectionality, like telling the story of my own life through the literature and through the research, allowed me to kind of resist and reject social science, like here's how you write a lit review. But I didn't want to write it the way I was expected to because it didn't feel real to my own sense of what feminist resistance is, not only in schools, but in the academy. I think what's interesting about doing multimodal research is that for me, I came to TC with my own digital archive already created. I wasn't seeking it out. And I think what I've noticed about some research is that the digital part is co-constructed with participants or it's created in the field while they're doing research.
I wasn't doing that when I arrived at TC. It was already created because of my classroom teacher experience. And so I think I came to this work quite differently, which is that I was thinking about writing about my students' blogging as a form of feminist activism. So when I came to TC, what I was searching for were these kind of... I was looking for the theory. I already knew Black and Latina feminist theory, but I didn't know how to always think through writing about it in the form of a dissertation. And so I had to seek out other researchers who were already doing that work. For me, it was about returning to the archive of my feminist teaching and my students' feminist... Literally the story of their coming to feminist critical consciousness together, we did this work together. So for me, it wasn't about factory-made creation of multimodality, but more so something that I came with to unpack together with my students because they had created it with and alongside me.
So for me, I think the advice I would give is, what's the story you want to tell through your research that actually means something to you, rather than it being something that you think needs to be manufactured for the sake of the academy, because then it won't mean something to you. I felt a lot of feelings writing my dissertation. I felt anger. I felt grief. I felt joy. I felt pride. I felt so many things, and I think it's because what I was writing about was a reflection of my own engagement with 26 years of teaching and I don't think you can manufacture that. And one of the most important images I think that I often use is this one that you see here with the girls with the fists in the air. Part of what we were doing in this assembly, you can see that they have paper in their hands.
That's the script that they used to do this assembly. And they wrote that script in my feminism class, and this was the assembly where they essentially called out that the school that they were at did not have a sexual harassment policy. And if there's anything that taught me about multimodal work, it was this moment, which is the students wrote this poem. They got up on stage, they put together slides on the stage to show their sense of urgency around addressing sexual harassment. They put their fists in the air, they use their bodies, they use their voices, they use their actual experiences. And then they got on this blog and wrote blog posts. So at every stage we were moving from theory to praxis, and they were doing that with their voices, their bodies, their writing, the assemblies, the blogging, the speaking out. That is multimodal work.
Yeah, I think something we learned during our doctoral journeys, whether directly or indirectly, and I think it's a combination of both, is that we want our research to be cited. And particularly those of us who go to places like Teachers College, we're trained to write research in the form of articles, in the form of books. And we're trained to kind of want and desire even certain citation practices where they're citing our names, they're citing our research, they're drawing from our work. So I think that's one way to be cited that I think is very much valued by the academy. I think one of the most important citation practices and experiences we might have is if teachers actually looked at our work and returned to their classrooms and their students and actually draw from our work, because ultimately what we're hoping for is more justice in our schools, in our systems, in this country in ways that are major interventions against, and I think major interventions against violence, all forms of violence.
It could be racial violence, it can be sexist violence, sexual violence, homophobic, transphobic violence, all these forms of violence, violence against immigrants being taken off the street. So many forms of violence that we see, even book bans as a form of violence, curricular bans as a form of violence. There are so many forms of violence we're up against right now. So I think the most important citation we could be having right now is teachers actually looking at our work, using our work, bringing back to classrooms, because that's really the work we're trying to do, which is to transform schools and systems. Something I'm working on now is going through the actual 26 years of ephemera. I think it's going to be some kind of critical autoethnography about feminist teaching. I think it can take multiple forms, critical autoethnography memoir. I like these kind of books that are part theory, part memoir, like auto theory kind of work.
I'm also working on transforming the three articles into actual publishable pieces. One of them was published in English Journal last year. The Piece is The Future of English is Feminist. It's basically the first article in the dissertation, which is about my feminist pedagogies and what does it mean to teach Black and Latina feminist pedagogies in the English classroom. And I purposely published it in English Journal because I wanted it to be a teacher-facing journal that a teacher would actually read. So I chose that journal to publish the first article in. And then I'm trying to figure out the multiple iterations of article two and three to put them in different journals, and hopefully they wind up in journals that are within the English education field, because I think it's important to contribute to the next generation of English teacher educators who want to bring feminist pedagogy into schools.