Putting Culture, Language, and Power in the Middle: Dual-Language Participatory Arts for Building Community and Making Change

Corre la Voz (CLV) is a teaching/learning program in Santa Cruz, California, revolving around an after-school workshop in multi-modal, dual-language arts where undergraduate and middle-grade student cohorts work with faculty to build transformative learning communities. The program’s partnership (UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz City Schools, Senderos) aims to improve immigrant Latinx community members opportunities to thrive and pursue their full potential, both on and off campus; and CLV aims to develop replicable pedagogies that educational activists can use when working with any communities or groups who find themselves displaced or in adverse circumstances. Using embodied-interactive means (drama, interview, play, discussion) and multi-modal text (photovoice, filmmaking, digital design), CLV’s projects create deliberate spaces where activity-based language arts work “puts culture and language in the middle,” as resources for community power and change-making. This chapter highlights participatory CLV activity designs in the after-school workshop. Each of the techniques discussed in this chapter works to shift cultural power in two ways: (1) they create spaces and build community by articulating collective values and Funds of Knowledge; and (2) they offer relevant literacy tools, norms, and processes for creating collective projects and solving problems so participants can change the stories they are in.