u.s.-mexico border studies online collaboration: transformative learning across power and privilege

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U.S.-Mexico Border Studies OnlineCollaboration: Transformative LearningAcross Power and PrivilegeLaura Barraclough a & Marci R. McMahon ba Kalamazoo Collegeb University of Texas, Pan AmericanPublished online: 09 May 2013.

To cite this article: Laura Barraclough & Marci R. McMahon (2013) U.S.-Mexico Border Studies OnlineCollaboration: Transformative Learning Across Power and Privilege, Equity & Excellence in Education,46:2, 236-251, DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2013.779146

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EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, 46(2), 236–251, 2013Copyright C© University of Massachusetts Amherst School of EducationISSN: 1066-5684 print / 1547-3457 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10665684.2013.779146

U.S.-Mexico Border Studies Online Collaboration:Transformative Learning Across Power and Privilege

Laura BarracloughKalamazoo College

Marci R. McMahonUniversity of Texas, Pan American

In response to the national conversation about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration in recentyears, we created an online partnership between students in concurrent border studies courses atour two campuses: a public Hispanic-serving institution in South Texas and a private, small liberalarts college in Michigan. We explored whether and how the tensions between privileged and dis-advantaged students documented in the traditional classroom would manifest online, and how wecould use virtual technologies most effectively to structure transformative learning, defined as recog-nition and articulation of the structural and cultural systems that frame individual experience andmeaning-making, across difference. As we document in this essay, tensions around racial, class, andeducational inequality did occur in our partnership. Yet these tensions were crucial in creating the con-ditions for transformative learning because they generated “disorienting dilemmas” that challengedstudents’ assumptions and knowledge. Our intentional integration of critical multiculturalist curricu-lum and pedagogical practices (especially embodied, facilitated online interactions) capitalized uponthose conditions. By the end of the partnership, both groups of students experienced significant—butdistinctive—trajectories of transformative learning that unsettled not only their individual under-standings, but also the dynamics of power that characterize the higher education landscape. Given thepolarization wrought by border and immigration discourse and educational policies that will likelyproduce increasingly segregated campuses in years to come, such online partnerships show promisefor critical multiculturalist educators seeking to create opportunities for learning across differenceand inequality.

In April 2010, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070, which affirms the requirement that immigrantsregister with the U.S. federal government and charges a person with a state misdemeanor if theydo not have registration documents in their possession at all times. The Bill requires local law

This collaboration was supported by the Teagle Grant at Kalamazoo College and the Center for Distance Learning atUTPA. We extend our gratitude to the student participants from UTPA and Kalamazoo College who made this collaborationpossible. Special thanks to Paul Sotherland, Anne Dueweke, Josie de la Tejera, and two anonymous reviewers, all ofwhom supported and improved our work.

Address correspondence to Laura Barraclough, Kalamazoo College, Department of Anthropology and Sociology,1200 Academy Street, Kalamazoo, MI 49006. E-mail: [email protected]

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LEARNING ACROSS POWER AND PRIVILEGE 237

enforcement, during a lawful stop, detention, or arrest, to determine a person’s immigration statusif there is “reasonable suspicion” the person is an undocumented immigrant (Support our LawEnforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, 2010). Although three of its four clauses were lateroverturned by the courts, the passage of the bill, considered the broadest-reaching and strictestanti-immigrant policy in recent years, generated intense debate on the so-called immigration“crisis.”

Like much of the American population, we were deeply moved by the events unfolding inArizona. As friends and teachers at different college campuses in different regions, we saw howdistinctly our students were responding to these events. Co-author Marci R. McMahon teachesat the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA), a public state university and Hispanic ServingInstitution in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Ninety percent of UTPA students are ofMexican descent and are often the first in their families to attend college. They cross borders intheir everyday lives as they negotiate family expectations, language, educational responsibilities,and economic realities. But while UTPA students generally have a deeply personal and lived-experience of the border region, McMahon found that, as a result of the Anglo-centric historiesthey frequently encounter in local secondary and post-secondary school systems, many had notbeen taught a critical history of the U.S.-Mexico border. Thus, although immigration policy,the drug war, and border militarization were having tangible effects on these students’ lives,the majority of UTPA students did not have the theory and historical context to locate theirexperiences within structures of power.

Co-author Laura Barraclough who teaches at Kalamazoo College, a small, private liberal artscollege in southwest Michigan, noted that the border was a distant and impersonal (sur)reality formost of her students. Kalamazoo College is primarily comprised of white middle-class studentsfrom Michigan and the Upper Midwest. The college has intensified its efforts to diversify thestudent body in recent years; of note are the college’s recruitment efforts in South Texas and LosAngeles, which have generated a growing Latina/o student population. The college’s curriculum,however, has not evolved to reflect the histories, communities, and experiences of these students.There are very few courses on race and ethnicity or immigration, and only one on the U.S.Southwest or U.S. Latinos, specifically Barraclough’s course on the U.S.-Mexico border, whichshe had taught once the previous year (2009). During that experience, Barraclough realized thateven though her students generally held liberal attitudes about immigration, they had virtually nofactual information, and certainly no critical perspective, on border issues and policy. Barracloughstruggled to fill in these voids, but found that secondary sources were often not enough tosubstantively deconstruct her students’ assumptions and myths.

As good friends who had attended graduate school together, we informally shared observationsabout our students’ distinct identities with each other by phone and e-mail. McMahon expressedto Barraclough her frustrations about how racial, class, and economic realities were affecting herstudents’ learning, for example, when students had to miss class to help their parents navigateimmigration policy or when students were distraught because family members had been kidnappedas a byproduct of drug war violence. Barraclough realized that these were precisely the kinds ofstories her students at Kalamazoo College needed to hear, and that engaging directly with theUTPA students (rather than with texts alone) could help deepen the Kalamazoo College students’critical understanding of border issues. Meanwhile, McMahon believed that her students at UTPAcould better understand the full range of perspectives embedded in the national conversationabout the border by interacting with students far removed from the everyday realities of border

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238 BARRACLOUGH AND MCMAHON

life. We began to wonder: How could we create an online learning partnership to intentionallyexplore issues of positionality, power, and inequality, both at the US-Mexico border and in highereducation?

In this spirit, we created an online collaboration between our concurrent border studies classesin Fall 2010 using the learning platform, Blackboard. All of the students who enrolled in thetwo classes—17 students from UTPA and 16 students from Kalamazoo College, for a total of33 students—participated in the collaboration. The partnership included three elements: (1) ashared curriculum that included theoretical and historical course materials about the culturesand structures of power along the US-Mexico border; (2) a series of self-reflexive projects thatrequired students to examine their experiences with reference to course materials; and (3) onlineexchanges wherein students from each campus compared and contrasted perspectives, challengedeach other, and reflected on what they were learning about themselves. Given the students’distinct contexts, we wanted to see how we could use virtual technologies to most effectivelystructure learning across difference. Would the tensions of intercultural learning that often occurbetween privileged and disadvantaged students in the traditional classroom also manifest in thedigital environment? What would be the best strategies for facilitating transformative learning,through which students recognize and articulate the structural and cultural systems that frameindividual experiences and meaning-making (Cunningham, 2010), in this context of difference?Would the digital environment create any unique challenges, or perhaps unique possibilities, fortransformative learning?

As we illustrate in this article, the well-documented tensions of intercultural learning didmanifest in our online environment, especially regarding students’ interpretations of each other’sacademic skills and sociopolitical perspectives. However, these tensions were crucial in creatingthe conditions necessary for transformative learning because they generated “disorienting dilem-mas” (Cunningham, 2010, p. 23) that challenged students’ existing assumptions and knowledge.Our intentional integration of critical multiculturalist curriculum and pedagogical practices capi-talized upon those conditions. We argue that by the end of the partnership, both groups of studentsexperienced significant transformative learning, though in distinct ways, shaped by their uniquesubject positions, that unsettled not only their individual understandings about immigration andthe border but also the dynamics of power that characterize the higher education landscape. TheUTPA students, despite their position as “disadvantaged” subjects, were significantly empoweredby the collaboration because they were consistently asked to situate their life histories within thecritical theoretical and historical context provided by course materials and to explain (or some-times defend) their perspectives to the Kalamazoo College students. The Kalamazoo Collegestudents, who entered the partnership as “privileged” subjects, also experienced transformativelearning, both because the UTPA students’ stories disrupted many of their taken-for-granted truthsabout the border and immigrants and because their lives and experiences were not at the centerof analysis, which led them to experience a temporary and limited form of marginalization—andthus to learn about how power works in an embodied, experiential way.

We found that the most effective strategies for achieving transformative learning were ex-changes that were embodied (in which students could see and hear each other), that occurredin real-time, and that we actively facilitated. Live video chats were especially effective and so,too, were discussions that we each facilitated with our own students in their separate, physicalclassrooms, which allowed each student body to process what was occurring in the partner-ship, reflect in a relatively safe space, and then re-engage across difference. Embodied, but not

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facilitated, exchanges were moderately effective.The least effective methods were those thatinvolved disembodied (usually text-based), asynchronous exchanges that we did not facilitate.

In what follows, we first explain the theoretical frameworks that guided the collaboration andthe methods we used to assess its effectiveness. We then narrate the dynamics of the partnershipas we experienced it, presenting qualitative data to emphasize the strategies that produced theconditions for transformative learning and students’ reactions to them. Next, using quantitativedata, we analyze the collaboration’s effects on students’ learning outcomes. We conclude byoffering recommendations for teachers who may wish to create similar partnerships.

LEARNING ACROSS DIFFERENCE: DEVELOPMENT TRAJECTORIESAND TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING

Education and psychology scholars have amply documented the tensions that emerge whenstudents from privileged and disadvantaged groups attempt to learn from each other. Such tensionsare partly the outcome of students’ differential identity development trajectories. Helms’s theorieson racial identity development are useful here; though she focuses on black and white students,we find them to be relevant to the students with whom we worked. Helms (1990) argues that blackracial identity development proceeds from a stage of pre-encounter, marked by an idealization ofwhiteness and denigration of blackness, through phases of bitterness and anger as consciousnessof racism grows, to the most advanced stages of internalization, wherein the individual embracesblack identity, and to commitment, where they work within structures of whiteness to change thosestructures. White racial identity development begins from an initial experience of pre-contact, inwhich the individual is largely oblivious to race and the differential effects of racism and privilegeand moves to stages marked by feelings of fear, guilt, depression, denial, or resentment until theindividual ultimately decides either to withdraw into the comforts of whiteness or commit herselfto a life of anti-racism.

Students often meet each other in the college classroom at different stages in these trajectories.As students challenge each other’s assumptions and interpretations, there is great potential forforward movement, even as these interactions are frequently frustrating and uncomfortable.White students are likely to deny or minimize racism, blame the victim, bring attention back tothemselves, or refuse to acknowledge their own participation in structures of privilege (AccapadiMotwani, 2007; Helms, 1990; Watt, 2007). Marginalized students who are grappling with theirown emotional responses to that status, especially in white-dominant institutions experience thedisplay or enactment of such defense strategies by majority students as “microaggressions,” whichPierce defined as “subtle, innocuous, preconscious, or unconscious degradations and putdowns”(as cited in Yosso, Smith, Ceja, & Solorzano, 2009, p. 660). Microaggressions lead to heightenedlevels of stress and a sense of “battle fatigue” among disadvantaged students as they decidewhether, and how, to respond and defend themselves. Within such contexts, Latina/o studentsand other students of color nourish themselves by building a sense of community in academicand social “counterspaces” that allow them to survive and even thrive in predominantly whitecolleges and universities (Yosso et al., 2009).

The scholarship of online teaching and learning suggests that such microaggressions are easilyreplicated in the digital classroom, with some methods more likely to exacerbate interculturaltensions than others. Some scholars (Akintunde, 2006; Sujo de Montes, Oran, & Willils, 2002)

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argue that text-based online exchanges, such as discussion boards and blog posts, enable studentsto feel more comfortable in voicing their ideas and confronting one another because they lackcontextual cues, such as race, gender, and age. However, others argue that the disembodiedaspect of text-based exchanges limits deeper critical interaction (Schmidt, 2011). Indeed, there islittle evidence suggesting that online discussion boards actually lead students to post “what theyreally think” more than they would in the traditional classroom (Hamann, Pollock, & Wilson,2009, p. 9). Schmidt (2011) argues, “Writing online about racial identities and our racial beliefsis no more honest and socially transformative than talking about them within the walls of thetraditional classroom” (p. 45). The online discussion board can therefore become “a place todeposit comments, but not interact,” thereby silencing rather than enabling the kinds of dialoguesneeded to reexamine privilege and power (pp. 45–46). More interactive, real-time methods thatallow for instructor facilitation, such as video-conferencing and webcams, have the potentialto enable students to confront one another as embodied actors in discussion rather than asdisembodied subjects in written text (Schmidt, 2011), but these technologies can also reinforceexisting power dynamics (Cifuentes & Murphy, 2000; Cifuentes, Murphy, & Davis, 1998). Forexample, Hammer and Kellner (2000) explain a scenario where

students meet the “Other” as real people in video rather than only in textual descriptions. These imagescan personalize individuals; they make it possible to experience the views, practices, and culture ofgroups outside one’s life. In particular, multimedia can dramatize oppression, making intolerance andbigotry vivid, showing the evil effects of racism and prejudice. (p. 13)

Yet this approach implies a one-way transfer of knowledge through which the “other” populationbrings diversity to the majority students, thereby reifying their privilege.

Thus, in the same way that simply making the population of a college campus more diversedoes not, by itself, decrease individual prejudice or transform social structures of power (Palumbo-Liu, 1995), neither does bringing diverse students together online automatically achieve thesegoals. A pedagogical strategy rooted in critical multiculturalism is needed, which Quijada Cereceret al. (2010) note, “re-center[s] multicultural education within a transformative political agenda,challenging relations of power and privilege, and seeking social and structural change” (p.147). For critical multiculturalist educators, curricular content and pedagogical practice must bedeliberately connected to social justice principles of equity, access, and social literacy. Nagda et al.(2003) argue, “Content without a transformative pedagogy may be rhetorical, intellectualizing,and divorced from reality. An active and engaging pedagogy without a critical knowledge basemay result in temporary ‘feel good’ emotions” (p. 168). Sleeter and Delgado Bernal (2004)identify four necessary components of critical multiculturalist pedagogy: (1) critical reflexivity;(2) critical analysis of class, corporate power, and globalization; (3) empowering pedagogicalpractices; and (4) analysis of language and literacy as a point of departure for democratic dialogue.If the digital classroom is to enable critical engagement with structures of power, these practicesmust be implemented online. When instructors thoughtfully integrate a critical multiculturalframework with technology, the medium has the potential to create “opportunities to examinewhat is usually unexamined about language, culture, and power in school settings” (Sujo deMontes et al., 2002, p. 268) and produce transformative learning.

According to Mezirow (as cited in Cunningham, 2010), transformative learning involves a shiftin one’s frame of reference, or the “structures of assumptions through which we understand our

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experiences” (p. 23). Such shifts are brought about by disorienting dilemmas, such as interactionwith students from diverse backgrounds in the classroom, that lead an individual to question,assess, and change his or her existing assumptions. There are three developmental phases thatsignal aspects of transformational learning: the socialized self, the self-authored self, and theself-transformed self (Cunningham, 2010). The socialized self accepts the meanings, values, andexpectations constructed by others as truth. The self-authored self, by contrast, can generatemeaning informed by her or his own values and experiences. The self-transformed self, finally, iscapable of understanding the structural systems that underlie meaning-making and seeing their“relationships and connections as prior to and constitutive of the individual self” (Cunningham, p.24). Cunningham concludes that only self-authored and self-transformed individuals are capableof experiencing transformative learning because “students need to understand themselves asmeaning-makers and, more importantly, understand that the system of meanings they operate outof is itself made” (p. 24). Our main goal in this partnership was to achieve transformative learningwithin a critical multicultural framework for all of our students.

METHODS OF ASSESSMENT

To operationalize transformative learning, we developed five learning objectives: (a) to assiststudents in bridging the course’s theoretical and historical material with the personal, everydayexperiences of people living and working on the border; (b) to expose students to differentperspectives; (c) to increase students’ general understanding of positionality, or the view that“people are defined not in terms of fixed identities, but by their location within shifting networksof relationships, which can be analyzed and changed” (Maher & Thompson Tetrault, 2010, p.164); (d) to increase students’ understanding of their own positionality and the structural andcultural factors underlying its formation; and (e) to help students to see how they are personallyaffected by the topics we studied. Each of these objectives encouraged students to explore aspectsof the structural and cultural systems underlying personal experience and meaning-making—thehallmark of transformative learning.

We used several methods to assess how well we achieved our overall goal and specificobjectives. First, we kept detailed field notes. Every time we assigned an exchange, we devotedpart of the following class period to discussions with our own students, asking them to notemajor themes they observed and to reflect on their causes, especially by making connectionswith the course materials. We then wrote field notes on the discussion, sent them to the otherinstructor by e-mail, and archived them. Second, we analyzed student work completed within thecollaboration, both written and oral (that we later transcribed), which we stored and preservedon Blackboard, paying particular attention to the themes that students wrote or talked about andthe discursive strategies they used. Third, we administered an anonymous, open-ended, in-classquestionnaire after the first substantive online interaction, the Border Autobiography assignment.Fourth, at the end of our academic terms, we administered a survey questionnaire and several shortessays to explore students’ perceptions of their own learning. The survey asked students aboutthe effectiveness of each of the methods of exchange and to evaluate how well the collaboration’slearning objectives had been achieved. The essay questions asked them to describe instances thatwere either especially important or ineffective and to analyze how the partnership contributed totheir learning about the U.S.-Mexico border.

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We tabulated the survey data by hand and read through all of the written materials multipletimes. We used open-coding techniques to identify major themes within the social justice ed-ucational frameworks that drove our initial learning objectives. We then applied these themessystematically to the data set, looking for both confirming and disconfirming evidence and refin-ing our themes as necessary to account for the variety of student experiences. All quotes includedin the remainder of this article are drawn from either the students’ work or their final assessmentessays (with their consent), or our field notes.

DYNAMICS OF THE PARTNERSHIP

Since our classes met on different days, we relied heavily on text-based responses as the firstmeans of exchange between the two campuses. Early collaborations involved the writing of one-page responses to two texts: Anzaldua’s (2007) Borderlands: La Frontera, a border studies andcritical multicultural text, and Maquilapolis: City of Factories (Funari & de la Torre, 2006), adocumentary film that examines the social and environmental costs of maquiladoras (factories)for women workers in Tijuana. With Blackboard’s text-based discussion feature, students fromboth campuses posted and responded to messages asynchronously, then commented on at leastone response by a person from the other campus. These text-based exchanges enabled studentsto meet each other and document their different interpretations of the material; yet they did notlead to any particularly challenging interactions that confronted students’ existing assumptionsabout immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border, or themselves.

More dynamic student learning occurred when students confronted one another in exchanges(both asynchronous and in real-time) that were facilitated by the instructors. When studentswrote, shared, and reacted to a project that we called the Border Autobiography, approximatelythree weeks into the partnership, they began to connect each others’ lives with the structureswe were studying. For this project, students wrote a 3- to 4-page narrative examining one ormore borders they had crossed or negotiated in their life. The intent was for students to criticallyevaluate their subject position in relationship to the course’s subject matter by considering howborders (including not just physical borders but also social borders such as race, gender, andclass) influence the life experiences of all of us—not just those of people who live near the actualU.S.-Mexico border.

The topics explored by each group of students in their border autobiographies brought to theforeground the dynamics of power that differentiated the two student populations. The UTPAstudents overwhelmingly (about three-fourths) addressed the role of social class, racial, gendered,and legal status marginalization in permeating their lived realities, while a smaller group (aboutone-fourth) wrote about metaphorical borders disconnected from issues of culture and power.The students who wrote about race, class, and gender topics consistently described their strugglesnegotiating ethnic Mexican-U.S. border culture and dominant white American culture. Some ofthese students described the tensions they felt as they strove for upward mobility, particularly theneed to balance schoolwork with family expectations and work responsibilities; many emphasizedthat college was not something they had ever been able to take for granted and was hard-won atevery step. Others expressed how within their Mexican families and communities they persistentlyfelt that their Spanish language skills were inadequate or that they were perceived as “not Mexicanenough” because of their name, skin color, or cultural capital. Ultimately, the majority of UTPA

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students’ border autobiographies illustrated their own relatively disadvantaged social positions, aswell as the ways in which they were struggling—often successfully—to transcend the limitationsof social class, immigration status, language, and educational inequity.

By contrast, many of the Kalamazoo College students’ border autobiographies made appar-ent their relative economic and racial privilege. The Kalamazoo College students addressed abroad array of topics, but followed three patterns. First, approximately one-third of studentswrote explicitly about their privilege. Some described crossing from their home environmentsto encounter racialized poverty through international travel, attendance at nearby and more eco-nomically diverse public schools, or participation in short-term tutoring projects in low-incomeschool districts; others lamented the limited perspectives and exclusionary attitudes of such homeenvironments. A second set of essays from about one-quarter of the students addressed metaphor-ical borders, such as their difficulty balancing sports and schoolwork or negotiating the valuesemphasized by their families with new ideas introduced by friends or in school. These essayssuggested that the students were not facing particularly challenging circumstances, or at leasthad not chosen to write about them. Third, however, the four Mexican American students fromKalamazoo College wrote about struggles similar to those of the UTPA students, including thedifficulties of learning English after migrating to the U.S. or adjusting to an elite, majority-whiteschool from their culturally Mexican home environment, and the upward mobility that educationoffered for them to transcend their families’ working-class status. The Kalamazoo College borderautobiographies evinced the privilege, traditionally defined, that most of the students, though notall, had experienced.

Students posted their autobiographies online and then commented on each other’s narrativesin small groups comprised of students from each campus. After they responded to each other onBlackboard, we distributed an anonymous, open-ended questionnaire in class, asking studentsto reflect on what they had learned from each other and about themselves. We used thesequestionnaires to launch separate discussions, which we documented in field notes. In thisinstance, we shared excerpts of our field notes with the other campus and then posted theanonymous responses to the questionnaires in Blackboard, where all students could access them.As students learned how the other group had responded to their border autobiographies in theprivacy of their own classrooms, they became aware of their relative differences, and importanttensions and disorienting dilemmas resulted.

When asked to reflect on what they had learned from the UTPA students’ border autobiogra-phies in the questionnaire, numerous Kalamazoo College students expressed awareness of theirown privilege. Some made comments, such as, “They had a lot harder lives than me, and theystill face more struggles than I do”; “They went through a lot to get to college. It wasn’t aseasy as it was for me”; and “Their lives seem to be much harder or [more] complex than myown.” Awareness of their social position culled a range of emotions, from anger and frustrationto sadness and guilt. One student wrote: “I felt saddened. . . . I was in awe of some of the thingsthey described, because it was so different from my own life.” A second expressed how herpartner’s autobiography had made her reflect comparatively on her own experiences: “I knew thatother students lived different lives than me, but I never really knew how different until I read theautobiographies. At times I felt angry and even guilty while reading them.” These reactions andemotions are typical of students from privileged backgrounds as they begin to recognize theirown positionality within institutional inequality (Helms, 1990).

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Most UTPA students, however, were not initially bothered by the racial and economic advan-tages that most of the Kalamazoo College students described in their autobiographies. Two UTPAstudents did comment on these differences in their questionnaires; one student wrote, “I recallfeeling somewhat astonished at the unabashed privilege and comfort from which their borderssprung,” and another student stated, “Some did not seem to be aware of their relatively highplace in society.” Such reactions are common among marginalized students who have alreadyhad significant encounters with privileged groups (Helms, 1990; Yosso et al., 2009). However,the vast majority of UTPA students expressed their surprise and relief in finding out, throughthe border autobiographies, how much they shared with the Kalamazoo College students. Onestudent wrote: “I felt connections; whether small or large. . . . I found this surprising because whatI think isn’t a big deal—could be bigger for someone else.” Another explained: “It made merealize we all face obstacles in our lives and that we have the strength to overcome them.”

Tensions did arise, however, in the ways that students interpreted each other’s academic skills.Some Kalamazoo College students expressed both in their questionnaires and the subsequentdiscussion that they were “confused” by the organization of the UTPA students’ ideas and bytheir writing. One student wrote: “I felt some confusion when reading the UTPA students’ papersbecause they were not at a very high level of discussion.” Another wrote: “I was intrigued to readtheir stories, but I had trouble following everything. I spent some time being interested and sometime being confused.” Barraclough’s field notes, written to McMahon, capture how the focuson the UTPA students’ writing dominated the discussion: “Students made comments about the‘disorganization’ of your students’ papers and that they were ‘confused’ by that. The implicationand feeling was that my students felt themselves to be better writers and better critical thinkers”(Barraclough’s field notes, October 13, 2010). In response, Barraclough engaged her students in adiscussion about structural inequalities within school systems, but felt frustrated nonetheless, par-ticularly when, toward the end of the discussion, one student wondered aloud if the UTPA studentsmight be intimidated by the Kalamazoo College students’ supposedly superior academic abilities.

Yet McMahon’s students had their own understanding of their academic abilities. WhenMcMahon shared Barraclough’s field notes from the Kalamazoo College class discussion, theUTPA students responded by challenging the Kalamazoo students’ existing assumptions aboutacademic writing. McMahon noted in her field notes (October 14, 2010) that her students describedhow they “felt more relaxed when writing because they didn’t need to prove themselves, whereasthey felt that your students’ writing was very detached, forced, and had a constant tone of provingthemselves because of their age. My students were not intimidated by your students’ level ofeducation at all but felt . . . that some [Kalamazoo College] students were really working hardbecause they might have felt intimidated by them.” In this discussion, the UTPA students assertedthat good writing is marked by authenticity, passion, and bravery and described the KalamazooCollege students’ essays as lacking because they showed a sense of innocence and inexperience,as well as a detached tone and writing geared for a grade or positive feedback (McMahon’sfield notes, October 14, 2010). Indeed, one UTPA student wrote in her questionnaire: “Theyseemed much younger, less experienced, and eager to prove themselves.” By the end of thecollaboration, however, some UTPA students nonetheless remained troubled by the Kalamazoostudents’ criticisms, with one student noting in her final essay:

Just because some of our UTPA students struggle with written language does not mean they are lesseducated or knowledgeable. And, while I realize some of our students made grammatical or spelling

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errors on Blackboard, it by no means shows they are less educated, in fact, they are some of the mostactively contributing and intellectual students in the class.

When students expressed their perceptions about writing, education, and power in our separateclassrooms, we could facilitate discussions about patterns of language and literacy (Sleeter &Delgado Bernal, 2004). For the UTPA students, in particular, the physical classroom and McMa-hon’s facilitation created a “counterspace” (Yosso et al., 2009) in which they could challengethe Kalamazoo College students’ judgments by drawing upon their own lived experiences andsituated knowledges. Yet the students were confronting each other through us (their instructors)from the safe spaces of their own classrooms, rather than directly engaging with each other. Weincreasingly felt that students needed to be able to challenge each other in real-time and that, tohelp them do so, we needed to take a stronger and more immediate role in facilitating their onlineinteractions.

In response, we introduced Wimba Live Classroom into the partnership with the goal ofintensifying the dialogue. We hoped that this real-time format, paired with our active facilitation,would lead students to directly engage and confront one another. We used the documentary filmSenorita Extraviada: Missing Young Woman (Portillo, 2001), which explores the femicide inCiudad Juarez in relationship to racial, gendered, and economic dynamics along the U.S.-Mexicoborder. We created four live sessions of eight students; each instructor moderated two discussions.We facilitated each session with questions that asked students to discuss why the femicides are notgetting the same kind of media attention as the drug war and who they thought is responsible for thedeaths of hundreds of young women—the Mexican government, the American government, theowners/managers of the maquiladoras where the women work, or the young women themselves.

As we had hoped, the live discussions enabled the students to directly and meaningfully inter-act. They asked each other follow up questions, clarified ideas, shared emotions, and confrontedeach other. They simply had the time and space to engage in extended discussions that becameprogressively more intense and complex, compared to the singular responses of the text-basedexchanges. For example, in a session moderated by Barraclough, for the whole first hour, studentsoffered diverse perspectives in response to our questions about power and structure and politelydisagreed with each other, yet they did not necessarily challenge the basic assumptions underly-ing each other’s claims, nor did they connect the discussion topic to their own lives. Two UTPAstudents had been arguing that the maquiladoras are accountable for the hundreds of deaths dueto their late night shifts, the lack of safe transportation, and the provocative photos of some of thewomen workers taken by management. One Kalamazoo College student, in contrast, had beeninsisting that the maquiladoras are not responsible for providing safety to the primarily femaleworkforce, nor liable for what may happen to them outside the factories. But finally, toward theend of the scheduled discussion, when Barraclough asked an open-ended question about whatfurther thoughts students had that they may have not yet shared, the UTPA students talked backto the Kalamazoo College student directly, challenged the assumptions underlying his arguments,and connected the maquiladoras with their own lives:

UTPA Student 1: I was just wondering: what if these maquiladoras were in Canada, how would youfeel?Kzoo Student: I’m sorry, what was that, if they were in Canada?UTPA student 1: or closer to you?UTPA Student 1: Yes, this is happening so close to us, here in the Valley.

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UTPA Student 2: . . . yes, it could be one of our relatives!Kzoo Student: I’m not saying it’s right or good. It’s just that if you want change, you can’t expect thecorporations to change, that’s the government’s responsibility.

Even though the Kalamazoo College student did not respond to the UTPA students’ personalappeals and reverted back to his previous arguments, the UTPA students were able to claim asignificant counterspace (Yosso et al., 2009) that drew upon their own lived experiences and cul-tural histories to challenge dominant understandings. Thus, the combined factors of embodiment,real-time and extended exchange, and facilitation in the live video classroom enabled the UTPAstudents to assert their everyday realities into dominant border discourse and, in doing so, tochallenge the Kalamazoo College students’ assumptions in a way that the text-based interactions,including the border autobiographies, had not encouraged.

The effectiveness of the live video chats and their contribution to both groups’ transformativelearning was echoed in the students’ final assessment essays. One Kalamazoo College studentwrote that the virtual Wimba discussions were useful because “being able to see and hear the UTPAstudents helped to personalize the experience, and it was a lot easier to understand their opinionswhen they came from their own mouths.” Another agreed: “I felt that the [video] chat really madethe border conflict that much more real.” The live video exchanges were equally powerful forthe UTPA students, though for different reasons. Due to the greater interpersonal connection thatthese discussions enabled, UTPA students were able to understand that the Kalamazoo Collegestudents’ opinions, particularly conservative reactions, were not necessarily based on maliciousintent, but rather detachment from the material and lack of first-hand experience with the borderor Mexican American people. One UTPA student wrote, “Before this class I always assumedthat the people did not care about what happened in the border. Now I can understand how thosepeople are just too detached from the border and don’t feel the need to know what is happeningin the southwest border states.”

The live discussions produced energy and excitement among our students that had not charac-terized the partnership previously, so we had high hopes for the final project, a series of “groupethnographies.” For this assignment, students were put into groups with others from their owncampus and required to conduct at least one informal interview and take field notes about socialinteractions in a physical space related to a border studies topic of their choice. Each group thengave a short presentation on their findings in their own classrooms, which were video recordedand posted online; we required the students to respond to each of the presentations from the othercampus using a short text response. UTPA students’ ethnographies explored the hand-drawn ferrycrossing at Los Ebanos, Texas; Border Patrol agents’ perspectives on the border; the gentrifica-tion of downtown McAllen, Texas; and the DREAM Act movement on the UTPA campus. TheKalamazoo College students’ ethnographies explored housing and neighborhood conditions inthe Edison neighborhood of Kalamazoo, where most of the city’s Latinos live; a bilingual ele-mentary school; labor conditions in southwest Michigan’s greenhouses; and Mexican Americansmall business owners in Kalamazoo.

We found that students from the two campuses experienced the group ethnography project quitedifferently, with the UTPA students gaining much more than the Kalamazoo College studentsin terms of their abilities to situate their own experiences within larger structures of power. Intheir final surveys, 100% of the UTPA participants reported that the group ethnographies were a“very effective” method of exchange; in comparison, 53% of Kalamazoo College students said

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the group ethnographies were “very effective,” and 47% said they were “somewhat effective.” Intheir open-ended final essays, only one Kalamazoo College student voluntarily chose the groupethnographies as being especially effective for his or her learning. We suspect that this discrepancyis partly due to the fact that the UTPA students’ ethnographies, which were centered on thephysical U.S.-Mexico border, merely extended information that Kalamazoo College students hadencountered throughout the course, whereas for the first time in the partnership, UTPA studentswere exposed to information about how the border is lived in other parts of the country. As aresult, the UTPA students could compare their experiences of Mexican immigration and culture inthe South Texas border region to the experiences of ethnic Mexicans throughout the country. Asone UTPA student wrote in her final assessment essay, “I was able to get a better understanding ofwhat these borders looked like for Mexican-Americans in Kalamazoo.” Another UTPA studentnoted how the Kalamazoo border ethnographies elucidated the larger structural factors related totheir socioeconomic marginalization in the U.S. This student wrote that the Kalamazoo students’description of a relatively lower-income neighborhood with a Mexican immigrant majority as“poor” was troubling to her:

I honestly felt a little disappointed when I saw that people who lived in “poor neighborhoods” wascompletely the opposite from the Valley. Here, what [they] described as a “poor neighborhood” isactually a nice neighborhood or even elite . . . [it] made me think if I ever moved to another state Iprobably would be considered “poor.”

The campuses’ different academic calendars were also significant: the Kalamazoo College’s termended three weeks before that of UTPA, so by the time the group ethnographies were posted,the Kalamazoo College students were no longer meeting in the physical classroom, and thus didnot have the opportunity to process what they had learned together in a facilitated discussion.The UTPA students, on the other hand, spent time discussing the other campus’s group ethnogra-phies together in-class with their instructor’s facilitation. For both of these reasons, among theUTPA students, the group ethnographies were a crucial element that cultivated awareness of thestructural systems underlying meaning-making that is a hallmark of students’ transformation toself-authored and, possibly, self-transformed selves.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Both groups of students experienced significant but distinctive transformative learning outcomes.The most significant outcomes for the Kalamazoo College students were that they encounteredand engaged new perspectives, and that they bridged theoretical, historical course materials withpersonal, lived experiences. In the final survey, 80% of Kalamazoo College students reportedthat the collaboration exposed them “a great deal” to different perspectives, compared to 59%of UTPA students. The Kalamazoo College students reported that they had developed a morehumane understanding of the US-Mexico border specifically because of their interactions withthe UTPA students. In their final essay, one student wrote, “Through our interactions, the borderhad more of a human element, because we got to see the border through their eyes.” Anotherwrote, “The number of students who complained of being unable to visit relatives in Mexicobecause of increased drug cartel violence really pounded home the issue . . . Before hearing thosestories, my concept of the issue was vague and theoretical.” Some Kalamazoo College students

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also said that the partnership was important because the UTPA students’ stories complicateddominant media sources, which they increasingly came to see as skewed and sensationalized.One student wrote, “This was the first time I had seen an unfiltered view of immigration thatwasn’t skewed by the media or politicians.” Others noted that the partnership challenged their ownstereotypes of immigrants and Mexican American people as constructed by the media, politicalpundits, and often their own families and home communities. One student also explained that heor she “learned that not the entire border is evil and a lot of what we hear up here in Michiganis stereotype and myths.” Another explained candidly, “I was able to . . . realize that all peoplecrossing ‘illegal’ into the U.S. are not necessarily criminals and are just trying to better themselvesand their families.”

All of these statements suggest that the Kalamazoo College students experienced transforma-tive learning as they began to move from socialized selves, who accept the meanings and valuestaught them by authority figures in their lives, to self-authored selves, who can generate meaninginformed by their own ideas, beliefs, and experiences. The majority accepted challenges to theirprior assumptions and knowledge with humility and expressed their respect for the wisdom ofthe UTPA students, as exemplified by the following statements [emphasis added to all]: “TheUTPA students experience this border on a daily basis and are experts on many contemporaryissues involving the border”; “I learned . . . that nothing trumps first-hand experience”; and “Ilearned the value of having direct experience to speak authoritatively about something.” Oneway of interpreting such statements is that the Kalamazoo College students now positioned theUTPA students—rather than the media or even course materials—as the “experts”; this tendencyis common in the “encounter” stage of student development, wherein students from privilegedbackgrounds romanticize the perspectives of those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Helms,1990).

As a result, some UTPA students felt that they had not learned much from the KalamazooCollege students. One UTPA student noted in his final essay, “the initial studies on the borderwere very efficient [sic]; the only part that I felt was not very helpful was their input on theborder. I believe it was interesting but they did not have much information to offer.” AnotherUTPA student strongly made this point: “I honestly don’t feel like the UTPA/Kzoo collaborationin any way helped me to learn about the U.S.-Mexico border . . . [although] the class overall did.”In a final class discussion about the collaboration that McMahon facilitated with her students, themajority expressed this view, with the prevailing thought by the UTPA students that “they learnedmore from us than we did from them” (McMahon’s field notes, December 6, 2010) Thus, thepartnership did produce the one-way transfers of knowledge that frequently characterize learningenvironments shared by privileged and disadvantaged students, and in this way, the collaborationdid reinforce existing dynamics of power in higher education.

However, we argue that these dynamics of power and privilege were nonetheless crucial togenerating the conditions of transformative learning for both groups of students. We suggestthat the UTPA students experienced substantial transformative learning precisely because theyengaged with students from more privileged backgrounds; the key, however, is that they did sowithin a critical multicultural framework. Through their interactions with the Kalamazoo Collegestudents, the UTPA students became better able to interpret the course materials from multipleperspectives and to see how their personal experiences were reflected in the theoretical andhistorical materials. In her final essay, one UTPA student wrote that dialogue with the Kalamazoostudents helped her to “understand and better interpret the literature since we had someone from

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a different area telling us what they found interesting and pointing things that we could havemissed since we are so familiar with the culture and ideas . . . it encouraged us to look deeper intothe writing.” Another explained: “Interacting with the Kzoo students and reading their reactionsto Borderlands reminded me of how unique this area really is. Having lived here most of mylife, I have a tendency to overlook how interesting my hometown really is.” As a result, in thefinal survey, 82% of UTPA students said the collaboration helped them “a great deal” to see howthey are personally affected by the course topics, and 65% reported that their understanding oftheir positionality improved “a great deal” through the partnership. By the end of the course,the majority of UTPA students developed a sense of pride in being from the border region, aperspective grounded in knowledge of the historical and social conditions shaping their lives—akey dimension of moving from a socialized self to a self-authored self.

Likewise, the Kalamazoo College students experienced an equally important outcome, and onethat we did not necessarily anticipate: that of being humbled relative to students conventionallyunderstood as “disadvantaged,” through the experience of having their own (usually privileged)life histories, perspectives, and sources of knowledge not be at the center of analysis. In the finalsurvey, only 27% of Kalamazoo College students reported that the collaboration helped them tosee how they are personally affected by the course topics, a figure that was, at first, disappointingto us. However, we realized that although the Kalamazoo College students did not always seehow the national conversation about the border implicated them, they, nonetheless, developed amoderately improved understanding of their own subject positions; in the final survey, 53% ofKalamazoo College students reported that their understanding of their own positionality improved“a great deal” through the partnership. We attribute this outcome to the Kalamazoo Collegestudents’ experiences of comparing and contrasting their perspectives with those of the UTPAstudents, and of being pushed, through instructor-facilitated conversations as well as reflexiveassignments, to consider the structural reasons underlying those divergent perspectives. We arguethat this experience was critical for the Kalamazoo College students’ learning because it helpedthem deconstruct their existing assumptions, not only about the border and immigrant populationsbut also about themselves as privileged subjects within higher education and U.S. society.

RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUDING REMARKS

We argue that our border studies partnership transformed not only individual students but also thepositions of privilege and disadvantage that initially characterized their educational trajectoriesand life histories. In this respect the collaboration contributed, in some small way, to dismantlingstructures of inequality in higher education. The intentional pairing of a critical multiculturalistcurriculum and pedagogical practices was crucial to achieving this outcome. Reflexive projectsand embodied, facilitated exchanges were most effective in generating the conditions for trans-formative learning.

For future collaborations of this nature, we recommend that instructors actively facilitate allstudent exchanges online, in real-time, embodied, and extended formats whenever possible, toreplicate the kinds of productive tensions that can happen when students from unequal back-grounds meet in the physical classroom. Instructors should not assume, as we initially did, thatstudents will do some of this work on their own. Instead, instructors need to pose the toughquestions and to challenge students’ assumptions, just as they do in the physical classroom, to

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facilitate students’ critical reflexivity about power, privilege, and their own positionality. We sug-gest that instructors use their own separate physical classrooms strategically as counterspaces forthe processing of inter-campus tensions that will inevitably arise, from which students can thenre-engage across difference. Instructors should reserve substantial time for debriefing in the classperiods immediately following all significant exchanges with the other campus, and incorporatemultiple methods of reflection (such as free-writing, anonymous questionnaires, and group dis-cussion) to guide student analysis of the partnership and of their own learning. As appropriate,instructors should seek training in facilitation and conflict resolution techniques, and they shouldensure that outside support systems are available to both students and themselves.

Given the polarization wrought by contemporary, often inflammatory, border discourse aswell as by policies and budget cuts to higher education that will likely produce increasinglysegregated campuses in years to come, we believe that partnerships like this will become crucialfor critical multiculturalist educators seeking to create opportunities for student learning acrossdifference and inequality, as well as transformations to the landscape of higher education. As oneUTPA student suggested in the final essay, “This might very well become the classroom of thefuture.”

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Anzaldua, G. (2007). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.Cifuentes, L., & Murphy, K. L. (2000). Promoting multicultural understanding and positive self-concept through a distance

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Funari, V., & de la Torre, S. (Producers & Directors). (2006). Maquilapolis: City of factories [Motion picture]. UnitedStates: California Newsreel.

Hamman, K., Pollock, P., & Wilson, B. (2009). Learning from “listening” to peers in online political science classes.Journal of Political Science Education, 5(1), 1–11.

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Helms, J. E. (Ed.). (1990). Black and white racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Maher, F. A., & Thompson Tetrault, M. K. (2001). The feminist classroom: Dynamics of gender, race, and privilege.

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Yosso, T., Smith, W. A., Ceja, M., & Solorzano, D. G. (2009). Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campusracial climate for Latina/o undergraduates. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 659–690.

Laura Barraclough is an assistant professor of sociology at Kalamazoo College, where herresearch and teaching interests center on urban studies and social inequality.

Marci R. McMahon is an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Pan American, whereshe teaches Chicana/o literature and cultural studies, gender studies, and theater and performancein the Departments of English and Mexican American Studies.

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u.s.-mexico border studies online collaboration: transformative learning across power and privilege

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