Testimonialista pedagogues: Testimonio pedagogy in critical multicultural education

Abstract

Teacher educators employ a variety of approaches to multicultural education. This article describes how we have our students grapple with their positionalities, to socially locate themselves and then to question the how and why of what they learned by employing testimonio, a genre of qualitative research that has its epistemological roots in Chicana feminist thought, as pedagogy. We discuss how we use testimonio in our classes and how students can use the process of creating and sharing their testimonios to cultivate a multicultural education (MCE) perspective and begin crafting their own culturally relevant pedagogy.