Elexia Reyes McGovern
Painting a Portrait of
Visible Teaching with
anActivist Educator
V
isible teaching invites educators
to bring activist and change-agent
identities directly into their teach-
ing. Visible teaching is working
collaboratively with a community to enact sus-
tainable, albeit constantly transforming, societal
change. Visible teaching highlights the daily acts of
resistance within a teachers life story that may not
be captured in traditional ways of understanding
action and change. At the heart of this article
is a story about one teacher who embodies visible
teaching. This story begins with me, a former high
school teacher and then doctoral student, explor-
ing the life work of Chicana teachers who see their
teaching as activismteachers who see both their
teaching and ethnic identities as acts of resistance
to hegemonic systems of schooling.
The story is written in the tradition of por-
traiture, a phenomenological inquiry process that
seeks to describe the nuances of the human expe-
rience within a specific social and cultural context
(Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis 3). Portraiture is
an appropriate method for interrogating activism
within English language arts (ELA) teachers lives.
This way of writing about ones human story al-
lows for creative and analytical writingimportant
components within ELA teachers classrooms and
personal scholarship. Employing portraiture as
storytelling provides nuanced ways to understand
the lived realities of activist educators engaged in
visible teaching by complicating daily acts of resis-
tance and change. Furthermore, portraiture pushes
back on dominant ideologies that insist on curric-
ular standardization. In this portrait, teachers will
68 English Journal 106.2 (2016): 6873
Copyright 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
EJ_Nov_2016_B.indd 68
Visible teaching highlights
the daily acts of resistance
within a teachers life story.
This article uses data from
a year-long ethnographic
study to paint a portrait
of one Chicana veteran
teacher who enacts an
activist pedagogy in
the secondary English
language arts classroom.
see the importance of social and cultural context in
connecting ELA curriculum to students personal
stories. In keeping with the tenets in the portrai-
ture tradition, I have included Ms. Romeros own
words to describe herself and her teaching practice.
Stories produce cultural and historical mem-
ories and create meaning in our human lives. As
such, stories are an act of resistance. Stories are the
artifacts of visible teaching. This is a story about
one activist teacher who practices visible teaching;
her name is Ms. Romero. Her portrait comes from
a year-long ethnographic study conducted in 2012
for my doctoral dissertation.
Ms. Romero is an educator who self-identifies
as an activist teacher; she calls herself an agent of
change an empowered individual who makes
changes within her own classroom, local school,
and community, through collaboration with others.
In this particular piece of her story, Ms. Romero
highlights the importance of collaborative relation-
ships in secondary schools to create engaging En-
glish language arts curricula that promote critical
thinking with students of color within the context
of their lived experiences as young people.
The Portrait of Ms. Romero
Ms. Romero is a home- grown activist teacher
(Irizarry 87) from South Los Angeles, a teacher
who was raised, lives, and teaches in the same com-
munity where she serves and who places service
to community above personal and economic gain
(Urrieta 118); she has twelve years of public school
experience and is National Board Certified. Ms.
11/9/16 6:30 PM

Romero identifies as Chicana because its not only
a reflection of my Mexican background and grow-
ing up and being born here (in the United States),
but its also a political term. For me to own Chicana
meant I was owning a political stance about being
an agent of change. Both her teacher and ethnic
identities, as a home-grown Chicana teacher, are
central to her practices as an activist teacher.
Ms. Romeros early experiences teaching in
South Los Angeles were isolating. By the time she
returned back to the community where she was
raised, she had already been teaching for six years
in a public school in Northern California. Ms.
Romero felt that when she arrived, other teachers
and school leaders assumed that she knew what
she was doing and left her alone in her classroom.
Without the support of other colleagues, Ms.
Romero felt lonely and adopted a close the door
and teach approach. These moments of isolation,
however, soon changed as she began to meet more
activist teachers in her local school, teachers who,
with Ms. Romero, would eventually leave this par-
ticular school site to design and open a pilot public
school in South Los Angeles that better served the
needs of the local community.
In her identification as a home-grown teacher,
the history of the local community is central to how
Ms. Romero envisions and enacts activist teach-
ing. She is conscious of who her students are and
intentionally adopts a teaching stance that incor-
porates their identities and lived experiencesthe
students storiesdirectly into the curriculum. For high-density neighborhoods as restrictive covenants
the purpose of clarity and in staying true to the tra-
dition of portraiture, which emphasizes the impor-
tance of social and cultural context, I will briefly
describe the school and surrounding community
in terms of demographics, migration patterns, and
local history. This context will more fully illustrate
how Ms. Romero incorporates this history into her
activist teaching with young people.
The student demography where Ms. Romero
teaches mirrors that of the surrounding community.
This locale was once a predominantly working-class
African American community and is now a pre-
dominantly working- class Latina/o community.
During the 201213 school year, approximately
80 percent of all students identified as Latina/o,
and 19 percent of all students identified as Black
and/or African American. Eighty-one percent of all
EJ_Nov_2016_B.indd 69
Elexia Reyes McGovern
students qualified for free or reduced-price meals
(California Department of Education Educational
Demographics Unit).
As the school resides within the borders of
what is now called South Los Angeles, the com-
munity history is intimately woven throughout
the fabric of Ms. Romeros story and in each of her
students stories. South Los Angeles is dynamic; for
decades diverse peoples have migrated to and lived
within its borders. Dominant media stereotypes of
South Los Angeles portray the area as violent and
gang-ridden. In actuality, South Los Angeles is a
vibrant, culturally rich, working-class community
that is home to migrants from within the United
States, Mexico, and Central America.
During the early part of the 20th century,
South Los Angeles was home to a mix of affluent and
middle-class African Americans, Mexican Ameri-
cans, Asian Americans, working-class Whites, and
immigrants from Mexico and Europe. The Great
Depression and World War II era saw millions
of African Americans leave southern states of the
United States to escape the conditions ofJim Crow
segregation, racial violence, and poverty in search
of work and more racially hospitable laws and
lands, which some found in California (Waldinger
and Bozorgmehr 4).
Many working and middle- class African
Americans journeyed to Los Angeles during the
Great Migration. Due to housing restrictions, these
new migrants found themselves within increasingly
limited African Americans housing options to a
small area bordered by the streets of Slauson Av-
enue, Alameda Boulevard, Washington Boulevard,
and Main Street in South Los Angeles (Sides 238).
Shortly after the Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) Supreme
Court decision, African Americans began purchas-
ing homes outside of this area (Sides 100), where
they were met with a torrent of racial violence from
White segregationists (Sides 18). The years that
followed saw most White residents leave South Los
Angeles and the surrounding areas, as Los Angeles
experienced white flight (Avila 21).
A series of events, like the loss of manufactur-
ing union jobs, growing unemployment, poverty,
and the subsequent Watts (1965) and Los Ange-
les (1992) uprisings, drastically lowered housing
prices. The rise of labor demands in low- wage,
English Journal 69
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 Painting a Portrait of Visible Teaching with anActivist Educator
semi-skilled jobs, as well as economic and political
conditions in Mexico and Central America, saw a
great influx of people from these regions also mi-
grating to Los Angeles beginning in the late 1960s.
The low cost of housing, in addition to the num-
ber of home vacancies left bymiddle-class African
Americans moving out of South Los Angeles, led
to the demographic shift of this area from a pre-
dominately African American community to now a
majority Latina/o community (Waldinger and Bo-
zorgmehr 14).
This has not occurred without tensions. Many
news stories have carried reports of Black and Brown
conflict within South Los Angeles neighborhoods,
oftentimes occurring within the guise of race riots
in local schools (Banks and
Ms. Romero personalizes Shields). Despite real racial
the historical change and economic tensions, other
through her familys media sources address the ways
experience. The stories that Black and Brown com-
that she shares about her munities are living together,
learning from each other, and
family migrating to and
developing an ethnic enclave
growing up in South Los that combines many different
Angeles form an essential cultures (C. Jones). These de-
part of her home-grown, mographic shifts and a peda-
activist pedagogy. gogy that focuses on interracial
relationships are central to Ms.
Romeros classroom pedagogy as a home-grown ac-
tivist teacher and form an integral piece of how she
practices visible teaching.
Within this reflection, Ms. Romero describes
how she speaks with her students about the demo-
graphic shifts within South Los Angeles and the
authentic tensions that have accompanied these
changes. Part of her activist pedagogy includes
sharing her experiences growing up in South Los
Angeles.
I tell them about my experience. I say we are the
family that came in and started shifting the per-
centages [from majority Black to majority Lati-
na/o]. When my parents moved here, 22 years ago,
you could see Latino families moving in with us
and after us and maybe right before us, and chang-
ing the neighborhood percentage from primarily
African American to half and half. And now there
are more Latinos. So I asked the students, why do
you think that happened? And students respond,
people started moving out. And I say yeah, people
70 November 2016
EJ_Nov_2016_B.indd 70
started moving out, and people started moving in.
I say but its not about trying to push somebody
out. That wasnt my parents intention. My par-
ents intention was to buy an affordable home. It
was an opportunity. Thats how I bring in those
conversations. If people are aware, which most
people that work with community groups in the
area are aware, theyre aware of the tensions. You
have to be because that whats going on.
In this passage, Ms. Romero illustrates that as a
home-grown teacher, she is acutely aware of the dif-
ferent narratives that have accompanied the demo-
graphic shifts in South Los Angeles. She encourages
students to explore the pushing out narrative that
many feel is happening to African Americansas
more Latinas/os move into the area. At the same
time, Ms. Romero calls on her activist teacher iden-
tity to simultaneously address the role of structural
influences and affordable home- ownership. Ms.
Romero personalizes the historical change through
her familys experience. The stories that she shares
about her family migrating to and growing up in
South Los Angeles form an essential part of her
home-grown, activist pedagogy.
Ms. Romero, as an agent of change in her com-
munity and committed to wider societal change, is
not content with simply naming the changes that
are taking place within local society. As part of her
activist teaching philosophy, she extends this con-
versation more globally. For example, Ms. Romero
describes how she discusses interracial relationships
through the ninth- grade English language arts
unit on perspectives and bias, which she created in
collaboration with the ninth-grade level team. In
this lesson, Ms. Romero employs a critical media
analysis (Kellner and Share 37477) of Hurricane
Katrina to encourage students to consider their
perspectives and bias about their Brown and Black
neighbors in South Los Angeles. She describes the
image that she uses in this activity (see V. Jones;
Ralli).
It shows two pictures of people in New Orleans
getting the food, right? In one caption it says that
they are looters taking and pillaging. In the next
picture it says that they are finding food. One pic-
ture is with a person of color and the other one is
not. So we talk about that. Why is that assump-
tion made? Why are specific and different words
used for each image? And students get that.
11/9/16 6:30 PM

While many teachers would have stopped the con-
versation there, as it appears that the students have
understood the media bias within the reportage of
Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Romero does not. This is
an intentional approach that has been fostered with
the ninth-grade team through conversations about
how to facilitate a critical media analysis frame-
work that extends from their classroom walls into
the neighboring community.
This approach allows Ms. Romero to develop
students critical literacies by asking students to
read the word (news images and captions) and then
read the world in regards to power relationships
(Freire 87)first, in the context of New Orleans
and Hurricane Katrina, and next in the context of
their own world, South Los Angeles. Ms. Romero
narrates:
Then we transfer that to our world. Students are
like oh, but that really is true. Its true that Lati-
nos will say that Black people dont work. And
Latinos are hard-working. And someone else will
say why dont Mexicans stay in their own country?
This is where I respond, so wait a minute, you are
telling me that we just say this and that and cer-
tain people are assuming certain things, and that
were not doing the same thing as the media [in
Hurricane Katrina]? And so we get into it.
Ms. Romero does not offer students a concrete solu-
tion for how to overcome such bias in their own
world. Rather, she states, we get into it. The
it suggests the making of a Third Space (Gutir-
rez, Baquedano-Lopez, and Tejeda 287; Gutirrez,
Baquedano-Lopez, and Turner 372).
The Third Space is a transformative space
where the potential for an expanded form of learn-
ing and the development of new knowledge are
heightened (Gutirrez 152). Third Spaces can
occur during learning activities that are filled with
tension and conflict (Gutirrez, Baquedano-Lopez,
and Tejeda 291) and consist of a dialogue between
the child and (their) future (Griffin and Cole 62), as
seen in conversations about interracial relationships
from Ms. Romeros classroom. Learning within the
Third Space attends to both vertical and horizon-
tal forms of learning, resulting in more robust and
historicizing literacies (Gutirrez 149). As such,
the Third Space promotes a critical analysis of
power relations that includes the naming and trans-
forming of ideological and material conditions that
EJ_Nov_2016_B.indd 71
Elexia Reyes McGovern
undermine the possibility for forms of community
and public life organized around the imperatives of
a critical democracy (Freire and Macedo5).
Ms. Romeros explicit facilitation leads stu-
dents from a critical media analysis of Hurricane
Katrina into a critical literacy analysis of interracial
relationships in South Los Angeles. While race is
usually not a normative schooling practice, in Ms.
Romeros classroom, racial analysis is welcomed and
centered in students realities. Analysis of race, class,
media, and power relations are encouraged within
the formal English language arts curriculum at this
school site, which also denotes a Third Space out-
side of official or normalized school practices.
Given that this critical media literacy curriculum
had been created in collaboration with the whole
ninth-grade team, this example of the Third Space
had been fostered within the conversations among
adult colleagues. This teacher collaboration further
demonstrates how Third Spaces are vital to a visible
teaching approach that includes adult colleagues
and young people. Third Space conversations are at
the heart of creating a visible teaching that extends
throughout a schools culture.
With Ms. Romeros guidance, the students
conversation is developed through their stories in
the neighborhood. Rather than give students an
answer for how interracial and interethnic rela-
tionships in South Los Angeles should work, Ms.
Romero allows students to speak from their reality,
creating a Third Space, where through the conflict
of multiple stances, opportunities for confluence
and transformation are possible (Franquiz and
DeLa Luz Reyes 217). Ms. Romeros facilitation
of Third Space demonstrates a culturally respon-
sive approach where students lived experiences in
their neighborhood becomes the unit of analysis for
reading the world. While one may not immediately
see concrete change related to Third Spaces in the
ELA classroom, these types of interactions do have
the possibility of forming cultures of change and
activism, where dominant ideologies and practices
are questioned.
As a home-grown teacher, Ms. Romero inti-
mately knows the community in which she teaches.
She connects her personal story to the experiences
of her students through a shared community con-
text. As a witness to structural inequities and inter-
racial tension and collaboration that exists within
English Journal 71
11/9/16 6:30 PM
 Painting a Portrait of Visible Teaching with anActivist Educator
this neighborhood, Ms. Romero enacts an activist
pedagogy through a culturally responsive curricu-
lum. Her visible teaching pedagogy includes work-
ing collaboratively with other school leaders to
develop an English language arts curriculum that
encourages students to develop critical analyses of
power relationship in society. Through such an ap-
proach, Ms. Romero is equipping her students to
act as agents of change within their community
to enact activist pedagogies in their own lives.
Conclusion
This portrait highlights the experiences of one
teacher, Ms. Romero, who uses alternative institu-
tional practices with colleagues, community, and
students as an act of resistance that embodies her
identity as an agent of change, activist teacher. Her
portrait emphasizes a significant tenet of visible
teaching: the importance of collaborative relation-
ships in creating change across
Collaborative multiple levels of school so-
ciety. Collaborative relation-
relationships provide
ships provide a foundation to
a foundation to create
create engaging curriculum,
engaging curriculum,
tailored to the needs of this
tailored to the needs specific school community.
of this specific school Ms. Romeros humility in
community. seeking to further understand
the needs of the students she
serves forms the foundation of collaborative rela-
tionships. Her portrait exemplifies visible teaching
through an activist identity that highlights collab-
orative relationships, students needs, and simple
acts of humility.
This story acts as a model for ELA teachers
who seek to practice activist teaching in their own
schools. As highlighted in the brief conversation
of portraiture, social and cultural context matter
for our teaching stories. A central piece of activist
pedagogy is knowing our students, their families,
and the communities that we serve. A piece of this
story is the fact that Ms. Romero is a home-grown
teacher; this is not to say that all home-grown
teachers will automatically know the communities
in which they were raised and now serve, nor is this
to say that other teachers cannot understand the par-
ticularities within the context where they serve. I
highlight the aspect of home-grown in the specific
72 November 2016
EJ_Nov_2016_B.indd 72
way that Ms. Romero practices service to her com-
munity. She is in continual conversation with stu-
dents to understand the multiple stances in which
they are seeing their own community. Humility
allows Ms. Romero, as a home-grown teacher, the
privilege of asking questions of her students to tie
her ELA curriculum directly to the lived experiences
of her students as a way to discuss structural inequi-
ties and give space for students to create and design
alternatives. Through this story, my hope is that
other teachers read into the humility and trust that
Ms. Romero shares with her students as part of her
home-grown activist pedagogy, and in turn enact an
activist pedagogy with their students in a way that
centers young peoples lived realities in their partic-
ular social and cultural context.
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Elexia Reyes McGovern is an assistant professor in the Teacher Education Department at California State University, Domin-
guez Hills, and has attended NCTE Annual Conventions since 2013. She can be reached at emcgovern@csudh.edu.

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