Digital Story for Article Coming Soon from Reflections journal

Digital Composing as Participatory Pedagogy

The digital composition below is based on my article in the Fall 2013 issue of Reflections: a Journal of Public Rhetorics, Civic Writing and Service Learning, a special issue on Latin@s edited by Cristina Kirklighter and Isabel Baca. The article is called "Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools" and examines the rhetorical strategies demonstrated in the writing of a culturally relevant student publication in Tucson, AZ by the name of Nuestros Refranes (2010), during the passing of the anti-Ethnic Studies bill HB 2281 in Arizona.

  "Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools" from Cruz Medina on Vimeo.

The production of this video came about from an assignment given in the second semester of a first-year writing class at Santa Clara University, in which students were to create short documentaries using iMovie on the iPad, as a part of the LEAD Scholars program. This digital writing artifact is a result of participatory pedagogy, where the instructor composed along side students, and with the help of students. I'm hoping to have student samples coming as well.

(Click image for Table of Contents)

Reflections Special Issue, Mexican American Studies, and Elias Serna

Coming Soon: Q&A with fellow Reflections contributor Elias Serna
Having earned my PhD this past May at the University of Arizona, I was in close proximity to not only Tucson Magnet High School where the Ethnic Studies program was outlawed by House Bill 2281, but I also had the opportunity to interact with MAS teacher Curtis Acosta and teach students who were MAS graduates. In this forthcoming issue of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civil Writing, and Service Learning, I have an article on a student publication that I co-edited in Tucson during the passing of SB 1070 and HB 2281. What makes the student publication Nuestros Refranes worth examining was that the prompt for the writing was designed to be culturally-relevant in much the same way that the TUSD MAS program's curriculum was meant to reflect the reality of the students it educated.

 (http://saveethnicstudies.org/)

 In addition to my own article, I'm excited to read Elias Serna's article because I have come to know Elias through his activism and research with Tucson Ethnic Studies. Coming soon, I'll be including a brief interview with Elias regarding his article and the current projects he active with. Elias Serna, a PhD Candidate at UC Riverside, in August won the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America 2013 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.

 (Portrait of Serna by Shizu Saldamando)

In the meantime, an extended interview with Dolores Huerta

The video below is an extended interview from the documentary called Outlawing Shakespeare that I posted earlier.

Video available at: www.outlawingshakespeare.com

Read more about Serna's Book Collector Award
A guest blog post of mine on Arizona in Spanish: http://www.letraslibres.com/blogs/frontera-adentro/educacion-contra-corriente-en-arizona