Book Club Pláticas: Reflexiones on Culturally-centered Methodologies

Book Club Pláticas: Reflexiones on Culturally-centered Methodologies

In Brief
In spring 2024, two Latinx colleagues at California State University, East Bay, developed a pilot program focused around hosting a book club which has evolved into a larger exploration of plática methodology. This article explores culturally sustaining co-curricular collaborations and spaces on a university campus through the use of book club pláticas and PRAXISioner reflexiones (Reyes, 2021). The authors reflect on their roles as PRAXISioners, plática as methodology and practice, and engage on the value of self-sustaining practices as Latine educators.
By
Daisy Muralles
and
Vanessa Varko Fontana
“This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade.”
Paulo Freire (1921-1997)
Introduction
In spring 2024, we took a popular model often used in American libraries, the book club, and added a cultural and community-building lens as part of that experience. In this article, we will share how we came to this work as PRAXISioners, and the barriers we aim to break down through our collaborative work. We will also describe how our collaboration on the book club project acted as a vehicle to hold culturally informed pláticas and what they looked like; and, finally, we also reflect on how this work allows us the space to come together with our own experiences as teachers and learners. The book club gave us an opportunity to explore the works of Latine scholars and authors, to engage in pláticas, allowing us to dive into new concepts and ideas about our culture that we had not discussed before–the unnamed things that somehow we understood as being part of our cultural identities but were not always sure of where they came from or why they existed. Throughout this article we will use the gender-inclusive “Latine” in place of the plural Latinx or Latina or Latino or Latin@, or its many variations. Created by feminist and nonbinary communities in both Latin America and the United States in the 2000s, Latine aims to describe all people, not just men or women (Guzmán, 2023).
We hope readers will walk away knowing the importance of culturally-sustaining co-curricular programs. We hope readers feel empowered to lean into their cultural-sustaining pedagogies to inform practices that are by and for BIPOC communities. We hope to inspire or mostly affirm for librarians who are already doing this cultural work, that this is important work for ourselves, our students, and campus communities.
Some of the content of this article was originally presented as, “Praxisioners Platicando: Fostering Belonging Through Culturally Centered Learning,” for Case Studies In Critical Pedagogy hosted by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (Muralles & Varko Fontana, 2024). The “Case Studies in Critical Pedag…