COE Connections Episode 12: Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
Testimonio as I view it and as I teach it to other teachers is a genre of writing that needs to be shared publicly and it is written in solidarity with the community. So it is very similar to memoir but it has a critical element to it that it is not written just for the self. It is not written just for telling my individual story, but it's written for the collective. It's written for the community in order to either give voice to an injustice that the community has experienced or to give a counter-narrative, so that we celebrate a community that maybe isn't often celebrated or has a specific connotation to it. But when we give the testimonio, we are giving it from ourselves, our community and the experiences that have shaped us to be able to walk in the world and not alone.

(Music plays)

Rachel Haine-Schlagel 
Welcome to COE Connections, the SDSU College of Education, Research and Scholarship Podcast Series. I'm, your host, Rachel Haine-Schlegel. I'm the Associate Dean for research for the College of Education, and an associate professor of Child and Family Development at San Diego State University, a Hispanic-serving institution on the land of the Kumeyaay. This is our sixth episode and our final episode of the season which we are recording from beautiful Philadelphia at the start of the American Education Research Association Conference, also called AERA. It is so exciting to have SDSU represented here at AERA by a group of faculty members and graduate students who are presenting papers, serving as discussants, participating in roundtables and attending networking events. And today I'm joined by one of them, Dr. Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz. Monica is an assistant professor of literacy at SDSU. Monica believes that the power of stories connects us to others around us. She has used her own voice as an advocate for students and to celebrate the communities of those students. Her research interests include literacy education, culturally sustaining pedagogy, equitable practices of teaching writing, and lat-grit theory of education specifically testimonio.  One of the projects she leads is Cuentos, a community writing project that centers testimonio and oral history in formal literacy, education for teachers' professional development. As a first-generation college-going student, she is dedicated to cultivating literacy, and education that is more reflective for historically minoritized student populations. 

Welcome Monica. The conference officially starts tomorrow. Did you just fly in today?

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
I did. Yes, I arrived here about 2:30 Philadelphia time. But yes, we began our journey at 4 this morning. I'm starting to feel a little sleepy. What about you, Rachel, where did you come in?

Rachel Haine-Schlagel 
Actually, I had a much easier travel day. I've been on the East Coast for about a week, and so I just took a train down from New Jersey, about 50-minute train ride. So, it was quite easy compared to a full day of flying from the West Coast. So, thank you so much, even more for agreeing to do this with me when you've had such a long day. And it's just the beginning of the conference. So given we're here at AREA, I thought I'd start out by asking, what are you most excited to see or do?

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
It's almost impossible to choose what I'm most excited about, but I think that because this is my first AERA in person I am most excited about meeting the scholars in my field that I've been citing. I'm excited to attend their workshops and presentations so that I can put an actual person or face to the name beyond just the digital world and the digital space. I'm also really excited to share the work that I've been doing with the Cuentos community writing workshop that you mentioned earlier and sharing some of my initial findings from our pilot program and the work that teachers are doing that is coming from the Cuentos workshops.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel
Well, I'm excited to see that as well. Ok, well let's turn to the typical questions that I ask faculty on this podcast series. So, my first question is why do you focus on what you do?

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz 
So, the work that I do is really personal to me because it's something that began I think when I was a really little girl growing up in a rural community in northern New Mexico, and having or not having access to books, I think that one of the things that drives me to literacy education and to making literacy education reflective of historically minoritized populations, comes from the fact that I attended a school that had 80 books in its library, and none of them were books that reflected who I was. None of my literacy education reflected who I was as a human being. The stories I told, the stories I read, the stories that my teachers prompted out of us were all from different cultures, from different walks of life. In fifth grade, my parents decided to do a book drive so that I could get more books and have more books in the library because I had run out of things to read, and there were only so many subscription services that they could have delivered to my home. And my mom is also kind of tired of me reading harlequin romances that I stole from my grandmother's bedside. So, they did a huge book drive for my school, and all of the books that we received were falling apart, there were not books that were modern, there were not books that you know, were something that I even wanted to read. 

So at that point, we realized that something is broken in the system that I couldn't get enough to read that satisfied, you know my curiosity, and so I think that it all started there, and I became an English teacher pretty quickly. I knew I wanted to do that when I was in high school I did an internship with one of my English teachers that allowed me to grade papers and now and then you know, it kind of led to me, being an English teacher. And as I continued my work the high school classroom, I still saw that we were reading the canon only. Everyone that we studied was a dead white guy, and there were no Latinas, there were no black women. There were some women, but none of them were reflective of the cultures in the communities I was teaching in my first teaching job was in the same town where I grew up in the high school, and we served a large native American, or indigenous population, with the surrounding Pueblos in New Mexico and a large Latine our Mexican American population as well, and I was dissatisfied with that, I wanted to find something more for those students. No matter where I went, even when I moved to Arizona, I still found, you know the curriculum was just restrictive and not reflective, not inclusive, not something that excited students. 

So, when I started my Ph.D. Journey, I found that there is this area of study called testimonio, which is about writing, it's about giving voice to silence histories, it's about empowering from within yourself and within your community to tell the stories that matter, to tell the stories that change the narrative of what people think about historically marginalized or minoritized communities. And so once I found that it became something that I couldn't let go of and it became something that allowed me to kind of go back to that little girl who didn't see herself in the stories that she was reading or telling, and be able to embrace that in the research that I do. And so it becomes something that is bigger than me because it is connected to my community. And it's connected to the communities of the teachers that I teach and the students that they ultimately will teach.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel 
There's there's so much we could unpack there if I was if we were spending an hour talking. So, how do you describe an example of the impact your work has had?

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
So one of the things that I'm most excited about right now is that I have two teachers who are writing with me and also designing the next Cuentos community writing workshop for the summer of 2024.They attended my workshops last summer, and through some of the initial findings that I have in in the workshop is, I realize that they are the experts of their stories and their communities and the communities that they teach in. So, they have become the leaders of their workshop because their voice is what is carrying my work through. And so their names are Selena and Alexia, and they are both humanities teachers, and they are also ethnic studies teachers, and they have taken the work that we did in the Cuentos workshop in the summer of 2023, and they have created a curriculum around it that is enhancing and making their writing classrooms just kind of really lively and robust. So they are creating a curriculum and that they are going to teach in the summer to other teachers, and that they are teaching in their classrooms right now centered around testimonio using corridos. So, corridos are ballads or hero ballads that are a traditional Mexican music kind of genre, and they tell the story of the heroes everyday life, or exciting hero stories, and their students are writing their own testimonios as corridos. And so we're planning on having some of those students present their work at our summer workshop. And then we're also looking at how story can be told through music and protests can be done through music. And all of this is coming from their creative minds, these 2 amazing teachers who I'm getting to write with and also who I'm getting to study what their impact is on the future teachers that they'll be working within the summertime. Watching them lead the workshops and plan and talk with them about it, and put how it's impacting their classrooms as well, it's been so phenomenal, it's my favorite check-in of the month. You know what we're gonna do for this coming Qantas. And so I see it growing. And I see it impacting more teachers. And then, therefore, then, like this way of writing, comes into the formal high school classroom or middle school classroom in a way that is growing organically because the teachers are excited about the work that they're doing, and seeing that what counts as writing can be so transformative for your classroom and doesn't have to be just that formulaic test prep type writing that doesn't excite anyone and still be rigorous and exciting and just really robust writing curriculum.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel 
That sounds like pretty much every faculty member's dream, at least in our college, to have that kind of a community impact. And to see that the work that you're doing with teachers is inspiring them to do just exponentially more. 

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
They tell me, thank you for the opportunity, but really I should thank them, because being able to to watch it grow in their classroom is beautiful.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel
It's wonderful that you are having these amazing positive experiences as part of your research and scholarship. I also want to ask you, what do you struggle with the most in focusing on your work?

Monica Baldonado
Finding the money to fund it. So, one of as you know, I wrote a grant for NAH, this is the first time I've written a grant of that size, and because I really want to pay teachers stipends to come to the workshops and the teacher leaders who are leading the workshops. I want to pay them for their time in developing these and in the summer program, and in order to do that I need money, and it's been challenging to find enough so that we can grow it large enough. I think that's the biggest challenge. The other challenge that I have is often with like writing and publishing because for me it's the community's voice that should be centered and that includes teachers, it includes students and sometimes in academia. That's not what's centered. The researchers lens, and the researchers' like knowledge and expertise are often centered. And so when I re-center that in publications I'm often sometimes questioned like,  how are you teaching these your participants to code, for example, describe this to me. And so it's become a challenge and also like a blessing. Because then I'm able to learn to describe better. And it impacts the way that I write, but opening the space I guess, and looking to the scholarship and literacy scholarship specifically, that is accepting of what we're doing and the work that that we're doing, and sees the value and the power in it can sometimes be a challenge.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel 
Yeah. And I can see how that could be also really challenging in terms of just what's valued in Academia in terms of the authorship order. And all those kinds of issues when you're working so collaboratively when you're really trying to be led by your collaborators.

Monica Baldonado
Right? Right, I mean, like their voices are the center of what I'm doing? So even presenting at Aer about Quentin's project, I'm talking about their work, and I wish I had had the money to present with them so that they're sharing their stories, and it's not just being filtered through me, but you know for this time is the first step, and then I think that as I kind of cultivate the ways that it works and I use the model of the national writing project because that often centers teachers voices first, I think that that helps because I have that kind of in background in literacy education as being a really robust model for teachers professional development.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel
So, my last question comes out of my own background as a clinical psychologist. So, if I could wave a magic wand and make literacy education better from your perspective, what would that look like?

Monica Baldonado
That would look like classrooms or literacy classrooms that are family-centered and community-centered so that families are not just invited into the classroom as observers when they come in to see their student perform something or during parent-teacher conferences, or for disciplinary actions. But, instead it's a classroom where families and their knowledge and the community's cultural wealth, as Yoso says, is valued and highlighted, and celebrated. So when we are writing about if we're writing an argument, for example, in a classroom, the argument should be centered upon. You know the community first, and what are the needs of the community to begin with, because then I think that when students have that foundation of the connection between school and community, and it's not kind of this like separate space, where they have to leave parts of themselves at the door, then we can create a foundation for students that allows them to expand who they are, and go out into the world with the knowledge that they have. you know, a valuable foundation that includes where they come from, and who they are as human beings.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel
I just, I just have to point out, I know this from other conversations we've had, that you really are living that in that you are blending your own professional work, your research, and scholarship with your family, and that your mom is collaborating with you, and she's actually presenting at not this conference, but she's presenting of a conference with you. So you're sort of walking the walk here in terms of what you how you want this to look for families and communities is actually how you're approaching your scholarship, which is really cool.

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
Yeah, I mean, I think it's so crazy, how that all came about with my mom, because I started this critical autoethnography, where I went back to my community and kind of traced my own literacy learning, as you know, from elementary school in my memory. And I actually physically mapped it. And then, as I was doing it, I started questioning. Well, the person who was the foundation for me with that was my grandmother, my mother's mother. And so my mom and I took a journey to find the schoolhouse where my grandmother went to school. She only went to school till eighth grade, and then she had to make a decision about whether or not she was going to be able to go to the high school, or she had to stay home and her family decided that staying home would be the most beneficial for the family, and so she didn't continue school. So she went to school in a one-room schoolhouse and we went and we found it. It's in ruins. I have pictures that are included in some of the presentations that my mom and I are doing. And as we were taking this journey, I started talking to my mom and one of her sisters, and both are. My mom just turned 69, and my aunt just turned 74. And so, as we're talking and we're having a conversation, I recorded our conversation all the way up. It was like a 4 h drive into rural New Mexico, and we just talked about their schooling and their literacy, and the ways that they learned to read and write, and the things that they did in school, and that started getting me thinking about why my mom decided to give me a book or decided that writing like how I learned to write was influenced very much by her, and also very much influenced by the ways in which language was talked about at home, and the way that language was talked about in school, and how there was this huge divide, like one of the things is my mom spoke Spanish until she, and her sisters, went to school, and then her mom decided that we don't speak Spanish in the home anymore until I know that, you are going to be proficient and successful in school, and I think that happened a ton in my community. And so, as I kept talking to my mom about it, I said. You know, I can't tell your story in quite the same way that you can tell it, and also your perspective on my story is so important to who I am and where I'm going next. And so I asked her, are you willing to present with me? Would you be open to telling this collaboratively the story of 2 women who grew up in different generations, but were educated in the same community? What does that look like? And she agreed. And so I was really excited. So, we are presenting first in New Mexico with a Trans Language Institute through Velasquez Press, and it's a small conference, and then we'll be presenting in Boston at NCTE. So, that'll be a little bit bigger for her, but I think it'll be exciting.

Rachel Haine-Schlagel
Is so cool, that's just really exceptionally unique scholarship experience to have, and I can't wait to hear about it. Well, thank you so much, Monica, for taking time to do this at the end of an extremely long day. I hope you have a very good rest of your night. Have a good dinner. I hope you enjoy the conference. I can't wait to see your work and run into you and say hi and thank you so much again. We're so excited that you're a part of the college.

Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
Thank you. I'm excited for this, too, and thank you so much for thinking of me as well. I think it is really great that you're doing this kind of series.