Research Spotlight: Dr. Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán
Q & A with Dr. Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán Beltran, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning
What are your research interests and research achievements?
Global education in K-12 settings is often a hidden curriculum that emphasizes abstract relations between nation-states almost outside the lived experiences of teachers and students. As a social studies and a curriculum scholar and educator, I am invested in learning from transnational youth’s lived experiences of citizenship and belonging to inform curriculum, particularly when it refers to the lives of young Latina/o/x/es. My research is informed and inspired by the work of Chicana, Third World, and decolonial feminist scholars whose work provides interdisciplinary and transnational framing to understand how the daily lives of young people are affected by geopolitics. A different line of research in my work investigates the schooling narratives of Black and Brown families who experience racial antagonization as they navigate the schooling system. This work is important because it challenges approaches to education that offer monocultural, monolingual, and nationalist curricula in schools reproducing deficit-oriented and assimilationist ideologies in education. In my research, I frequently use narrative methodologies that allow me to see how personal stories become sites of connection between the self and the social world, sites of resistance against dominant narratives and erasure, and where people make sense of their everyday lived experiences.
As research achievements, I would like to mention my two most recent publications, Aspiring Nepantleras: Conceptualizing social studies education from the rupture/la herida abierta in the journal of Theory & Research in Social Studies Education and Enlaces in Reflections and (Re)memberings as Latina Border-Crossers: Journeys of childhood and Professional Un/Welcomings in the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series. In the past five years, I have co-founded the Community Narratives in Focus (CNF), a collection of narratives on the schooling experiences of historically excluded families in K-12 and higher education. This digital project includes the creation of the mini-documentary Schooling Narratives.
How does your work align with UTRGV’s and CEP’s strategic plans?
My research supports the CEP’s efforts towards educational equity, pluralism and multilingualism through its CEP’s B3 initiative. Integrating scholarship and life experience to curriculum challenges approaches to education that offer monocultural, monolingual, and nationalist curricula reproducing deficit-oriented and assimilationist ideologies in education.
What are your current projects?
Currently, I am co-guest editor of the special issue Inter-Epistemic Dialogues with Decolonial Studies from Latin America/Diálogos Inter-epistémicos con los Estudios Decoloniales desde América Latina in the Educational Studies journal. The purpose of this special issue is to open “an inter-epistemic space that will foster an ecology of decolonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial knowledges (de Sousa Santos, 2006, 2009, 2018)” and to “complicate the decolonial conversation by thinking from and with Indigenous, Black, and Mestizx discourses and praxes emerging from the Global South.” I am also working on a manuscript that focuses on curriculum and place ideologies. The narratives of Black families and children in our study bring light to how unequal relations of power operate in everyday practices and interactions in school settings. More importantly, the narratives provide important insights into how these can be transformed. Finally, I would like to mention my joint effort with researchers in Colombia to generate opportunities for collaborative autoethnographic work with faculty and students at UTRGV.