Teaching In/Between - (Curating and Interpreting Culture) by Leslie C Sotomayor (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

'Teaching In/Between: Curating educational spaces with autohistoria-teoría and conocimiento' is an iteration of an educator's embodied teaching and theorizing through testimonio work. Sotomayor, through a decolonizing feminist teaching inquiry, documents and analyzes her experiences as a facilitator in higher education while teaching the undergraduate course 'Latina Feminisms, Latinas in the US: Gender, Culture and Society'.

This unique book is her interpretation and implementation of the seven recursive stages of Gloria Anzaldúa's conocimiento theory as transformative acts to guide her research design and teaching approach. Sotomayor's distinct bridging of Anzaldúa's theories of autohistoria-teoría and conocimiento offers an expansive perspective to how theorizing and curating our lived experiences can be transformational processes within academia. Sotomayor applies Anzaldúa's theories and her own theorizing to curate educational spaces that decolonize White hegemonic academic canons and empower underrepresented learners who may experience a deep sense of not belonging in academia. She situates herself in the study as curator, and her practice as curator as an agent of self-knowledge production and theorizing to create self-empowering learning environments.

Sotomayor's work dwells within the lineage of border and cultural studies with shared voices of Gloria Anzaldúa, AnaLouise Keating, Mariana Ortega, Ami Kantawala, Maxine Greene, and Ruth Behar. Her work is considered a guide for teaching practitioners and researchers who hope to develop ways of knowing within their teaching environments that are inclusive and holistic for learners through a non-linear transformative process. 'Teaching In/Between' can be adapted for classroom use for pre-service teachers and instructors as well as creative interpretations for interdisciplinary works within Chicana/x, Latina/x, Art Education, Visual Arts and History, Women's & Gender Studies, Border and Cultural Studies.

Review Quotes

Leslie Sotomayor weds the transformative acts in Gloria Anzaldúa's scholarship to her students' and her own articulation of personal and collective testimonios. Using her course on Latina feminisms as her case study, Sotomayor decolonizes the privileging of white experience, rendering visible, instead, narratives that remain under-represented. The educator emerges as curator, as healer and messenger; curating, for Sotomayor, "is a concept and an action." She articulates a glossary of empowerment that combines the Academy's "trending terms" with a LatinX vocabulary that remains resolutely unitalicized. The banyan tree-a potentially essentialist metaphor-is transformed, in Sotomayor's hands, into a historically-grounded, ancestral epiphyte.

[...] Sotomayor's call to reform higher education is perfectly timed to respond to the contemporary climate of rising critiques of systemic racism and privilege in higher education and in the art world.

Dr Charlotte H. Wellman

Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

This book offers a critical intervention that very much recognizes teaching as an art - this is aside from academic discussions of teaching as performance. Instead, this book situates the authenticity of self through coming to know the self, which acts as a gateway to an interconnected and transformative classroom. In this space of interconnectedness based on lived experiences and story, the educator becomes curator encouraging active and communal learning, growth, and reflection.

Sotomayer offers educators everywhere much to think about in regards to how they approach their classrooms and what it means to decolonize a space historically rooted in imperialism and whiteness. Refreshingly, Sotomayer realizes this aim is far too expansive for any one book or paper, but does offer an important voice for consideration as we all unlearn the ways in which we have internalized the harmful narratives of colonialism. Sotomayer's work also gives the reader a space to envision what these teaching practices could look like in a largely mediated space as our world shifts toward more digitally-based forms of connection.

Dr Stevie N. Berberick

Washington and Jefferson College

"Teaching In/Between: Curating Educational Spaces with Autohistoria-Teoría and Conocimiento" contains a well-documented overview and discussion of the relevance of feminist theory and the decolonization of the curriculum at all educational levels. While chronicling her personal experiences from childhood to receiving a Ph.D. in Art Education and Women's studies at Penn State University, Dr. Sotomayor skillfully merges the most current thinking regarding feminist theory, the decolonization of the curriculum and social justice. She uses the notion of "autohistoria-teoría" or self‐knowledge practices to illuminate the colonialization of the educational experience" in the United States' public schools. Sotomayor suggests that a reframing of the curriculum is necessary for the schools to provide an optimum education for every student. She proposes the creation of "curatorial education environments" that do not entail a regurgitation of information or a traditional banking system of education, rather a system that would be supportive of conversations with creative acts through individual and collective lived experiences, histories, and various contests. Dr. Sotomayor calls for the "decolonization" of the educational system and the provision of an education that integrates the soul, mind, spirit, and individual experiences into the learning process.

Dr. Grace Hampton

Pennsylvania State University