Explore the vast range of titles available.

Storytelling can help youth, families, and communities make sense of their experiences, allowing them to process the past and plan their futures. The practice of storytelling in biographical learning, we argue, can be especially powerful when working with youth of color and Indigenous youth-children whose biographies are often misrepresented or unrepresented in the stories they see in the classroom. In this article, drawing on our work with Nuestros Cuentos, a community-driven storytelling program, we present storytelling as a method for reflection, resistance, and community-building with Latinx and Indigenous youth. The Nuestros Cuentos program takes place in Nkwejong-an Anishinaabemowin word used to refer to the approximate areas of Lansing and East Lansing, Michigan. Meaning where the rivers meet, Nkwejong has long been an important meeting place for Indigenous people, and the area has in recent decades seen an influx of Latinx and Indigenous people pursuing work in factories and as migrant farmworkers.

Based upon my own testimonios, I merge critical education and testimonio to argue for the integration of love, community, and a disruption of the teacher/learner binary within higher education, in this article, I present the concept \"pedagogy of love\" and suggest how it can be accomplished through a true dedication to a shift within the prevailing meritocratic educational model. Using testimonio methodology, I examine the obstacles prohibiting acts of love and the use of testimonios in a university classroom. Currently, faculty are pushed to demonstrate productivity through entrepreneurial endeavors, rather than building a community of engaged and critical learners. It is in this era of standardization and over mechanization that faculty struggle to maintain meaningful humanizing relationships with students, which is even more complicated for women faculty of color who attempt to map onto a white middle-class student body their own ideas of a community-building framework. Throughout my narrative of survival and celebration, I recount the challenges in integrating a pedagogy of love in the university space.

While much research addresses issues related to rural Indigenous communities, this article discusses an Indigenous youth-centered program serving an urban Great Lakes community. In collaboration with the local school district and county health department, the author collected data to frame a curriculum that responds to the specific needs of urban Indigenous youth in the Great Lakes region. The resulting program aims to bring together multiple generations to address high local dropout rates, health disparities, and the disconnect between the community and school. Dividing the curriculum into four areas — community/edinizing, culture/naadizewin, health/minomaadiziwin, and academics/kendaasewin) — allows the program to reflect an urban Great Lakes Indigenous experience. In addition to describing the need for each curricular component, this article provides examples of how each component is enacted through a summer program serving children 5-15 years of age.

This article outlines the emergence and ongoing sustainability of Nuestros Cuentos, a community and youth-oriented storytelling project that highlights the stories and histories of Latinx and Indigenous youth in children’s literature. By fostering what the authors call a Comunidad de Cuentistas (Community of Storytellers), Nuestros Cuentos provides a space for Latinx and Indigenous youth to write, edit, and publish a collaborative book of stories that is then distributed into their own community. Following the calls of researchers like Riojas Clark, Bustos Flores, Smith, and Gonzalez (2015), Nuestros Cuentos aims to increase the representation of multicultural literature for children, specifically by encouraging Latinx and Indigenous youth to write stories that represent their own experiences, histories, and interests.

A brief sketch, as provided by the 2010 Michigan Migrant Head Start Community Assessment, describes Michigan migrant students in the following terms: (1) approximately 17.5% are high school graduates; (2) 92.46% live in homes where Spanish is the preferred language; and (3) 93.3% live below the poverty line. These circumstances create a complicated situation for those students entering rural schools, schools which are not fully equipped to provide sufficient academic support services for migratory families. Such challenges severely inhibit academic success and meaningful community engagement; a positive school experience is stifled when separation between home and school exists (Epstein 1995; Dorries 2002; Olivos, 2009). Using a component of a larger study, this article considers the growing concern to adequately educate the nation's migrant farmworker children by focusing on the Cherryville Summer Migrant Education Program (SMEP) situated in the rural Midwest. The original project investigated accessible solutions connecting migrant and seasonal farmworker (MSFW) communities with rural Midwest summer migrant education program classrooms. Specifically, the project focused on the ways in which the education program supported bilingual/bicultural development. The findings reveal that the struggles encountered by educators and MSFW families were a product of miscommunication, inadequate curriculum support, and a lack of confidence engaging with one another. Furthermore, the study of the Cherryville SMEP found families sensed that school-situated MSFW home pedagogies were inferior when compared to needed academic knowledge. Of particular significance for this article is the discussion around connecting the home to the SMEP that developed in response to concerns raised by the migrant families themselves. This article utilizes personal narratives provided by the migrant community and educators to address issues of staffing, language barriers, and curriculum which rural SMEPs may use to bridge their migrant students.