About

Paty Abril-Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her Ph.D. in Social, Multicultural, and Bilingual Foundations with an emphasis in educational equity and cultural diversity at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018. Her dissertation focused on identity journeys through spoken, written, and artistic testimonios, exploring long-term caring relationships between bilingual Latinx teachers, students, and their families through Chicana Feminist orientations using qualitative arts-based methods. Prior to her graduate studies, Paty Abril-Gonzalez was a bilingual elementary school teacher for seven years in Denver, Colorado, working in dual immersion and traditional bilingual education settings, including in the district where she learned English as a young student. Her research agenda includes studying long-term relationships with Latinx bilingual students and teachers, emphasizing arts-based biliteracy approaches to affirm silenced perspectives, build connections, and develop bilingualism and biculturalism. She is actively involved in various committees and projects related to cultural diversity, global culture, and bilingual education, and has received grants and awards recognizing her contributions to the field.

Selected publications

• Collective dreaming as conduits to enact just futures in childhood/s education and care

  Global Studies of Childhood · 2024-08-05 · 1 citations

  article1st author

  We joined this collaborative space as colegas and friends, who come from diverse personal and professional backgrounds and have connected to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in various ways. When we asked ourselves what it means to reconceptualize ECEC, we began with situating this idea within our own childhood, familial, and professional lived experiences, and based on these, how they have inspired us to dream for more just futures, particularly for children who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this collective dreaming piece, we imagine a different reality, transforming how education and society engage with the children in our educational care. Through the act of going back in time, stories are affirmed and validated, knowing we are, and were not, alone when it came to experiencing white supremacy and Anti-Blackness in education. While we cannot do much to change the past, we engage and connect through a sisterhood, and in our commitments to social justice in education, in the present and future.

  PublisherDOI

• The Border Arte We are “Writing”

  2024-01-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This “border arte” poem is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa's quotes, related to imagination and magical thinking, which crosses and disrupts geographical, metaphorical, linguistic, and emotional borders and disciplines. Moreover, this found poem comes from an unpublished manuscript drafted by the author and titled, “Using Transdisciplinary Feminism and Translanguaging to Incubate and Develop Pictorial Early Literacy Connections.” By moving back and forth across genres and modes, such as diary reflections, doodles, collage, and other arts-based mixed-media products, multiple drafts and visual renditions of this unpublished text were generated. Moreover, arts-based practices unsettle the constraints of linear text writing. The author then found the poem within the unpublished text, unavoidably re-establishing linearity through poetry writing. However, translanguaging and transdisciplinary feminist lenses and perspectives became necessary in navigating such limitations in writing. Moreover, this “border arte” poem carves routes and pathways for alternative ways of learning and teaching. It also pushes against limited definitions of literacy and legitimate knowledge. Using creative expressions and artistic exploration, collective cultural and linguistic knowledge across multiple generations, languages, fields, and disciplines, ideas were planted and harvested into a poem of resistance to the harms caused by the attempts of systemic oppression and social injustice to bury our collective knowledge.

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• Interlude

  2024-01-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Our book disturbs convention. In homage to Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, our ‘Hundreds’ continue that tradition through a number of forms that cannot be summarized as an ‘abstract.’ All we can do is invite you in.

  PublisherDOI

• Resistance Testimonios for Reclaiming Teaching Instruction and Assessment Practices: Holistic Narratives of Bilingual Latinx Youths’ Knowledge Through Long-Term Relationships

  Journal of Latinos and Education · 2023-09-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACTThis study, informed by Chicana Feminist frameworks, explores bilingual Latinx students' resistance testimonios pertaining to instruction and assessment. These testimonios transpired through pláticas [familiar gatherings] between adolescent youth and the author, also their former elementary school teacher. This study is contextualized within historical and current ways white supremacy impacts education for bilingual Latinx students. Reviews of the literature show how standardized testing does not always capture a full narrative of bilingual Latinx students' knowledge. While educators cannot dismantle all the limited ways of assessing students at once, this article adds to the scholarship on how teachers can build long-term relationships to mend these sources of harms. The past relationship, between the students and the author, helped establish plática spaces, where they collectively reflected on the ways instructional and assessment practices hurt or dismissed their communities. In the pláticas, students enriched their sociopolitical consciousness by pushing and pulling each other to share their lives. Assembling their collective testimonios reveals alternatives to understanding what bilingual Latinx students know. Remembering with, listening to, and assembling students' testimonios collectively over time offers how educators might build longer lasting and broader relationships, for a broader, more expansive holistic understanding of Latinx students' experiences in school. Educators must collaborate together, as there is a critical opportunity for reclaiming instructiom and assessment practices.KEYWORDS: Latinx adolescentsrelationshipsChicana feminist epistemology Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Long-term relationships in this article are defined by multiple years (three to four years+) that passed between the former teacher/author and the student/participants' formal relationship in the classroom. The former teacher/author moved up with students for four years in elementary school. Then, the former teacher/author maintained contact with many students as they transitioned from elementary to middle and high school. The relationships continue to this day, as the former students are now young working and college-attending adults.2 All names of sites and participants are pseudonyms.3 School leaders gave me two teaching/assessment options. Either the students could take the third-grade exam in English, assuming they would score lower in third grade and increase scores when taking the test again in fourth grade. Or students could take the test in Spanish, with an assumption their scores would likely drop when taking it in English for the first time in fourth grade, rather than third. The school leadership team trusted and supported my decision to support students' language development, and honoring their need to take their first standardized test in their native language.

  PublisherDOI

• Excavating the Methodological Terrains of Life Writing

  2022-09-27 · 1 citations

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• Un asunto de familia: promoción del capital comunicativo y las identidades escriturales de los niños(as) pequeños(as)

  Pensamiento Educativo Revista de Investigación Educacional Latinoamericana · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Este estudio investiga las formas en las que los padres/madres/cuidadores multilingües apoyan las identidades emergentes de sus hijos(as) pequeños(as) como escritores(as) y comunicadores(as) en el hogar, en el contexto de un programa virtual de alfabetización temprana para familias de una comunidad históricamente marginada cerca de la frontera de los Estados Unidos y México. El estudio se centra en un conjunto de composiciones multimodales que los niños(as) de cuatro años escribieron durante una de las sesiones virtuales de videoconferencia. Las investigadoras emplearon un enfoque de análisis de discurso examinando las transcripciones de las sesiones virtuales, guiado por el concepto teórico de riqueza cultural comunitaria y el concepto pedagógico de acompañamiento. El análisis ofrece una narrativa contraria a los descriptores gubernamentales deficitarios (por ejemplo, bajos ingresos, bajos logros) asignados a niños(as) y familias de comunidades históricamente marginadas. Los padres y madres en el estudio estaban bien equipados para llevar a cabo pedagogías de acompañamiento que cultivan el capital comunicativo de sus hijos(as) y fomentan sus identidades como comunicadores capaces.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Woman of colour feminisms as a vehicle for racially-just methodologies in educational research

  International Journal of Research & Method in Education · 2022-08-02 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  There is an overwhelming presence and dominance of white-centric methodologies in educational research. To create necessary re-envisionings, we theorize how approaches to methodology can be disrupted and rethought through Black feminisms, Chicana feminism and Womanism. While each are distinct in their standpoints and contours, they have strong points of affinity, such as their focus on the generation of theory through lived experiences, interrogating various forms of oppression, coalition building and spirituality. From these intersections, we begin by discussing how Black feminisms, Chicana feminism and Womanism, as theories in the flesh, can re-envision methodology, generally. We then provide specific examples of putting Chicana feminism and Black feminisms to work in order to foster authentic relationships in collaborative inquiry and incite ruptures and renarrativizations through life story inquiry. We end with a discussion of how working in solidarity among women of color feminists can enact coalition building as a site of methodological revolution.

  PublisherDOI

• “Mix Learning with Everyday Moments”: A Virtual Recipe for Early Literacy Development at Home

  Language Arts · 2022-09-01 · 2 citations

  article

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, when educators and guardians/parents collaborated as community compañeres, they supported literacy learning experiences that honored children’s home lives.

  PublisherDOI

• Enlaces in Reflections and (Re)memberings as Latina Border-Crossers: Journeys of Childhood and Professional Un/Welcomings

  Occasional Paper Series · 2021-04-16

  articleOpen access

  We are humbled to be part of this special issue honoring the life work of Jonathan Silin. His scholarship and activism have opened spaces for future generations, like our own, to share our testimonios. We are straddling between being former early childhood teachers and current teacher educators—between our profe lives and our everyday lived experiences as Latina border crossers. Testimonios, which we engage in for this piece, have herstorically captured intimate tellings that connect individual struggles and strengths to the larger collective (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001). It is in these testimonios that women of color (and in our case, Latina) scholars have felt hospitality and welcoming. Although our tellings may be painful to write and read, Lorde (1984) and Anzaldúa (1987) remind us that we must write for survival and tell our stories in our own words. In that way, we acknowledge the deep intergenerational wounds felt by Latinx peoples and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), while providing a means for conocimiento/healing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pláticas on Early Childhood and Bilingual Education: Reckoning with the Past to Envision the Future

  2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Labs

• Department of Curriculum and InstructionPI

Awards & honors

• 3MT Winner, University of Colorado Boulder (2018)
• Awarded a Grant from Alba Ortiz and James Yates Endowment in…