Becoming: First-Gen and Latinx Experiences

Digital Stories: First-Gen and Latinx Experiences centers on personal experience as a subject of analysis and as a means to facilitate the construction of new social knowledge. Students in the Contemporary Latino Literature and Film (SPAN 381) class captured, in digital story form, the experiences of first generation and/or Latinx students at Kenyon College and explored, together with Mount Vernon high school students in the Kenyon Academic Partnership (KAP) Spanish class, the themes of bilingualism, cultural contact zones, and nepantlismo (“the land in the middle”) through literature and digital stories. A primary teaching goal of this project was to decolonize the classroom and academic knowledge production. Using oral history, community-engaged learning, and digital storytelling, the students documented the role of radical resistance that first-generation and Latinx student played in the emergence and sustainability of their identities. Their digital stories engaged our campus community and beyond, as the College’s newspaper The Collegian documented.