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Deconstructing immigrant girls' identities through the production of visual

narratives in a Catalan urban primary school
Montserrat Rifà-Valls a
a
Art Education, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

First published on: 11 March 2009

To cite this Article Rifà-Valls, Montserrat(2009) 'Deconstructing immigrant girls' identities through the production of
visual narratives in a Catalan urban primary school', Gender and Education, 21: 6, 671 — 688, First published on: 11
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 Gender and Education
Vol. 21, No. 6, November 2009, 671–688

Deconstructing immigrant girls’ identities through the production

of visual narratives in a Catalan urban primary school
Montserrat Rifà-Valls*

Art Education, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

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(Received 29 February 2008; final version received 14 November 2008)

Taylor and Francis
CGEE_A_368174.sgm

Taylor
Dr.
Gender
10.1080/09540250802680040
0954-0253
Original
02009
00
montserrat.rifa@uab.cat
000002009
MontserratRifa-Valls
&and
Article
Francis
(print)/1360-0516
Education (online)

In this article, the research findings of a deconstructive visual ethnography

focused on the production of immigrant girls’ identities will be analysed. This
collaborative research project involved experimentation with a dialogic
curriculum aimed at creating diverse identity narratives with immigrant girls at an
urban primary school in Barcelona. Using a theory of subjectivity based on
feminist post-structuralism and subaltern studies, I will deconstruct: (1) the role of
‘subjugated knowledges’ when the curriculum is used to rewrite children’s cross-
cultural narratives; (2) the production of local/global children’s identities through
the interaction between ethnic, racial, gender, age and social class subjective and
learning positions; and (3) the creation of new curricular spaces and times in
which differences are empowered and distance is transformed between schools
and families, public and private knowledge, official and subaltern identities, as
well as between teaching and research.
Keywords: feminism; visual narrative; immigrant pupils; girls’ identities;
subalternity; dialogic curriculum

Researching the margins of the school curriculum, picturing girlhood in an

immigrant community
The children’s narratives that I will reconstruct in this paper were produced at the
Collaso i Gil public primary school, located in the southern section of Barcelona’s
Raval neighbourhood.1 ‘Raval’ means the part of a town located outside the central
district, that is ‘on the margins’ or ‘on the edge’ of the city. Bordered by the Rambla
and the harbour, the Raval was dubbed the Barrio Chino in 1925. Over the past 100
years, various urban planning projects have sought to create more cohesive, luminous
and open spaces in the Raval. Historically, the marginal identities associated with this
multicultural barrio included immigrants, prostitutes, proletarians, anarchists, poor
children, bohemians and homosexuals. Currently, the Raval is seen as a typical example
of an older Barcelona neighbourhood; it is also being transformed into a tourist and
cultural destination. Moreover, the architectural projects undertaken in post-Olympic
Barcelona (i.e. after 1992) have led to gentrification; as a result, many Raval residents
have been displaced and dispersed across the territory. In this article, I will use an eccen-
tric point of view (De Lauretis 1990) or a view ‘from elsewhere’ (Pollock 1996) to
reconstruct girlhood narratives of curriculum in order to respond to socially biased ideas
about the Raval.2 A rewriting of girls’ identities in an immigrant community like the

*Email: montserrat.rifa@uab.cat

ISSN 0954-0253 print/ISSN 1360-0516 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09540250802680040
http://www.informaworld.com
 672 M. Rifà-Valls

Raval represents an opportunity to reflect on and visualise the margins of the inner-
city curriculum.
This article focuses on the reconstruction of the autobiographical narratives
produced by a group of fourth-grade girls at this urban primary school in the Raval,
which could also be defined as an affordable transitional district for migrants. Various
schools are located in this crowded neighbourhood, including five public primary
schools, three private religious schools and two public secondary schools.3 Established
in 1932, the Collaso i Gil primary school is housed in a monumental building that epit-
omises the grand scale of the public education projects undertaken during the Second
Republic (1931–6), which aimed to provide free, secular and non-discriminatory,
public, modern schooling.4 However, the Spanish Civil War and the Franquist dicta-
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torship (1936–75) interrupted this process of social and cultural transformation. A

traditionally authoritarian and sexist educational model predominated at this urban
primary school until the 1980s, when the old discourses and power structures began
to clash with the proponents of multiculturalism, co-education, school reform and new
professionalism.
Currently, Collaso i Gil’s curriculum focuses on educating the newly arrived popu-
lation: over 90% of the school’s pupils are from immigrant families. A variety of nation-
alities, languages and cultural backgrounds are represented in each class (e.g. Pakistan,
Morocco, Ecuador, Romania, Dominican Republic, Colombia, China, Bangladesh and
Brazil).5 Based on the visual data that emerged from the ethnographic research, I will
analyse the construction of immigrant girls’ identities in an educational project in which
the pupils created identity and diversity narratives through the stimulus of contempo-
rary art. In particular, I will reconstruct the identity storylines produced by Carolina,
Oumayma, Beira, Gabriela, Naujot, Karen, Aracely, Tanzela and Oumaïma, all of
whom were 9 or 10 years old and who were selected from among the 22 boys and 13
girls who took part in the project.
By performing pedagogy in terms of social justice and civic responsibility rather
than from a colonising position, I began this film ethnographic research project three
years ago with the aim of reflecting on a dialogic curriculum focused on identity and
diversity.6 In addition to reproducing the curriculum sequence used during the lessons,
including explaining the pupils’ prior knowledge, together with the learning activities
and the production and assessment of visual autobiographical narratives, I will struc-
ture the analysis based on the interpretation of subjugated knowledges, invisible
stories and multiplicity of agencies in curriculum development. I will primarily
perform this reconstruction by transcribing video scenes that narrate how immigrant
girls – whose stories show they represent themselves as Latina, Muslim, heterosexual,
immigrant, black, ‘mestiza’, pre-adolescent, poor, daughters or pupils – negotiate with
school knowledges, geographies and bodies through their learning processes to
produce girlhood micronarratives.

A deconstructive visual ethnography of subjectivity from feminist post-

structuralism and subaltern studies
The research framework is based on the intersection of three different theories applied
to curriculum development and diversity studies: critical post-structuralism, feminism
and subaltern studies. These theories share an anti-humanist theory of subjectivity. In
a Foucauldian sense, assuming that ‘different discourses provide for a range of modes
of subjectivity and the ways in which particular discourses constitute subjectivity have
 Gender and Education 673

implications for the process of reproducing and contesting power relations’ (Weedon
1987, 88), feminist post-structuralism has reconceptualised subjectivity as multiple,
precarious, contradictory, desirous and moving. Feminist post-structuralism and
subaltern studies intersect to deconstruct binary oppositions that place speech/voice as
positive agency versus repression/silence as passive.7 Subverting power–knowledge
relations in traditional and critical pedagogy, feminist post-structuralist scholars have
problematised the practice of making pupils’ voices and experiences visible
(Ellsworth 1989; Britzman 1989; Grumet 1990; Lather 1991, 1998; Orner 1992;
Kramer-Dahl 1996). From this perspective, silence could be rethought as a resistance
strategy for pupils’ subaltern identities. Consequently, the role of the teacher as a
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consumer of authentic marginal stories is in crisis since the desire to teach by learning
from others leads teachers to adopt colonising practices, especially if the effects of
exploring identity and diversity by recreating a ‘fiction of repressive unity’ (Orner
1992) through the curriculum are not analysed.
However, while structuralism-based anti-humanist theorists successfully expose
the sovereign subject, i.e. the subject of colonial and imperialist subjugation, they are
less successful when attempting to install a subaltern subjectivity and to describe how
it is constituted. Moving beyond the anti-humanist position, Lather has suggested that
we should move towards a post-humanist loss of transcendent universals and should
turn to Derrida’s definition of post-Enlightenment ‘undecidability’. Post-critical unde-
cidability implies the need ‘to think ethnography otherwise, as a space surprised by
difference into the performance of practices of not-knowing’ (Lather 2001, 480).
Taking a theoretical and methodological approach, I will summarise the contributions
made by Spivak’s theory of subjectivity, which I will apply to analyse a curriculum
that is designed to address identity and difference. In this study, the main contribution
of Spivak’s theory is deconstruction, which permanently questions the authority of the
investigating subject and helps to bypass the process of objectifying subaltern subjec-
tivities, i.e. the paradox of controlling their knowledge in a ‘desire for totality (and
therefore totalization)’ (Spivak 1987a, 201).
In reinterpreting Spivak for educational research, I should also point out that the
margins of school curriculum discourse could perversely serve to validate its ‘centre’.
We are thus engaged in a process of ‘reversing, displacing and seizing the apparatus
of value-coding … In that sense “postcoloniality”, far from being marginal, can show
the irreducible margin in the center’ (Spivak 1993, 63). In rejecting a marginal posi-
tion for postcolonial intellectuals, ‘working on the margins’ means analysing the
social, racial, gender and economic construction of the centre and appealing for an
agency of re-inscription in the school curriculum. As Spivak has demonstrated, subal-
tern consciousness ‘cannot be recovered’, consequently ‘the subaltern’s persistent
emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the
efforts of the disciplinary historian’ (1987a, 207). Spivak also maintains that women
are the best representation of otherness, ‘the colonized subaltern subject [who] is irre-
trievably heterogeneous’ (1988, 284). In the context of subaltern studies, the question
of women is structural rather than marginal, and we should approach the ‘intricate
interanimating’ relationships between the margins and the centre from political and
economic – not only from the social and cultural – interests that are also sexually and
gender-mediated.
Feminist post-structuralism and subaltern studies coincide in that their theoretical
Figure 1. Naujot as a participant in the visual ethnography.

frameworks cannot provide an explanation that leads to universalism; in both cases,

theory is situated, provisional and unstable. According to Luke (1996), the feminist
 674 M. Rifà-Valls

Figure 1. Naujot as a participant in the visual ethnography.

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project of writing and teaching difference, in attempting to contest universalisms and

hierarchy by deconstructing gender privileges, produces new ‘hybrid genres and
narratives of dissent’, a type of counternarrative or memory of disapproval and resis-
tance. In this study, pupils and educators collaborated in rewriting the contemporary
narratives of childhood through curricular practices in order to reconstruct children’s
agencies by making inequality visible. From this point of view, educational research-
ers should deconstruct the historically discursive formation of girlhood master narra-
tives since writing logical and linear narratives and creating homogeneous
consciousness are reciprocal processes. As Spivak has pointed out, to contest the
catachrestical strategy on which European identity production is based, we can
empower the process of writing and reading heterogeneous storylines:

[Current] postcolonial claims to the names that are the legacy of the European enlight-
enment (sovereignty, constitutionality, self-determination, nationhood, citizenship, even
culturalism) are catachrestical claims, their strategy a displacing and seizing of a previ-
ous coding of value. It can show us the negotiable agenda of a cultural commitment to
marginality, whereas ethnicist academic agendas make a fetish of identity. The project,
as always, is the recoding of value as the differential possibility of exchange and the
channeling of surplus. Postcoloniality as agency can make visible that the basis of all
serious ontological commitment is catachrestical, because negotiable through the infor-
mation that identity is, in the larger sense, a text. It can show that the alternative to
Europe’s long story – generally translated as ‘great narratives’ – is not only short tales
(petits récits) but tampering with the authority of storyline. In all beginning, repetition,
signature. (Spivak 1993, 64–5)8

As a consequence of rethinking voice and authenticity in light of the tensions between

post-colonialism and post-structuralism, heterogeneity-related work implies, accord-
ing to Lather, opposing the creation of ‘homogeneous spaces of collective consensus
and communication’ and conceptualising ‘defamiliarization’ as tactics of disrupting
hegemonic interpretations and de-stabilising practices of ‘telling the other’ (McGee
1992, quoted by Lather 2001, 484). Therefore, the methods used in deconstructive
visual ethnography involving curriculum studies and video-based research aimed at
exploring girls’ multiple and diverse subjectivities must incorporate complexity,
palimpsest, reflexivity, indeterminacy, and evocative and creative strategies. In this
ethnographic research, blurred boundaries between visual data and children’s narrative
production also transform the relationship between who writes and for whom. In addi-
tion, the utilisation of deconstructive ethnographic methods in educational research
entails a moving ‘to some place interrupted, out of balance, extreme, against the level-
ing processes of the dialectic and for the excesses, the non-recuperable remainder, the
difference, in excess of the logic of non-contradiction’ (Lather 2001, 480).
 Gender and Education 675

This ethnographic research project experimented with different modes of writing

– presenting audiovisual data, (dis)connecting the theoretical framework and the
fieldwork notes, narrating the girls’ stories in order to represent multiplicity and
diversity – and dealt with the ethical dilemmas that emerge from the complexity of
power–knowledge relations in feminist research. A deconstructive ethnography was
developed to study the production of immigrant girls’ identities, which I conceptual-
ise as a social, cultural, political and gender-based process; during the analysis,
however, I refrained from colonising or overwriting the pupils’ personal memories.
In the article, I will also discuss how visuality should be integrated into this decon-
structive ethnographic task. I will discuss various types of visual documents: photos
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that the girls selected from family albums; works by different contemporary artists
dealing with identity and diversity; visual autobiographical narratives produced
during the curriculum experiment; and frames from the film ethnographic research
(Figures 1–8). The following sections will also address the following questions: How
do the children’s stories of diaspora enhance the girls’ agencies in global capitalism
and postcolonialism (i.e. crossing national, social, age and gender positions)? How
did the film ethnographic research visually contribute to producing the girls’ subjec-
tivities based on hybridism and articulation? How can a dialogic visual arts curricu-
lum be developed by negotiating shifting identities and differences through the
learning processes?

The role of ‘subjugated knowledges’ in rewriting girls’ cross-cultural narratives

in a dialogic curriculum
From the very outset of the project, the role of ‘subjugated knowledges’ modified the
idea of a dialogic curriculum focused on the pupils’ understandings of identity and
diversity through contemporary art. As educators and researchers, the participants
realised that, although the curriculum lessons were designed to disrupt the relationship
between expert and popular knowledge, the immigrant girls had to participate more
actively by providing their personal and cultural knowledge. In analysing the role of
subjugated knowledges in the curriculum,9 I will reconstruct the process of sharing
personal stories from the girls’ family albums after the teacher narrated his own auto-
biographical account, in which he described an image of a boy who was helping his
mother to set the table during a family celebration. The following statements introduce
the process used by the pupils to start the production of visual autobiographical
narratives. These statements illustrate why the pupils selected certain photos from
their family albums and indicate how they represent themselves when describing and
interpreting these images.10

Beira: It represents a special day for me, my birthday, I was four and my mom was
with me in the Dominican Republic. I was living with my grandma and my
mom was always in Spain, she only came to visit every two years … I felt
sad. The day after, I opened my presents: there was a tiara, a gold watch and
other things.
Carolina: I dressed up to go to the Carnival parade in Ecuador with my brother. When
I saw the picture, I remembered that everybody in my family called me
‘angel’. They also called my brother ‘giraffe’ because he was very tall and
proud; he called me ‘smurf’. When I was a child, I was a good girl, the
perfect one. It was better to be an angel because people said: ‘She looks like
a little saint!’ But I was a devil when I started to fight with my cousin and
my brother.
 676 M. Rifà-Valls

Oumayma: I’m with Carol, who might be moving to another school and country next
year. We took the photo when we went to the children’s festival. The
‘Lunnis’11 are in the photo but it is a digital effect, I’m not interested in
them. I prefer the TV series ‘Pasión de gavilanes’, ‘Rubí’ and ‘El cuerpo del
deseo’. I have a scrapbook for collecting pictures of actors and singers and
so on.
Gabriela: My mom wanted to take this picture last year in the new flat. I have a room
of my own that I’m temporarily sharing with my aunt. I can talk with my
aunt and my mom about ‘girls’ things’, which are different from ‘boys’
things’. Boys say that girls are ‘pijas’ or ‘chulas’12 but the boys are vain.
When we move again, like we always do, my mom will take another photo.
Oumaïma: It was my birthday and my father and mother were there. My father is from
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Saudi Arabia and my mother used to travel to Lebanon to work and see her
friends. There were cookies, cakes and soft drinks at the party. I wore a
beautiful dress; every birthday I wear a different dress. I have a lot of them,
eight … When I came here I couldn’t find clothes from my country. I keep
them to remind me of my country.
Naujot: I like this picture, it was a special day because we organised a party in the
temple. There’s my little sister. My father took the photo. My father wore a
turban and my brother’s hair looks like boy’s hair. What my mom put on her
face is what women put on when they get married and at certain other
special occasions in their lives. It’s a symbol of our Sikh religion. We’re
from India.

In this section, I will interpret the process of producing learning and autobiographical
Figure 2. Beira interprets the picture from her family album.

texts that refer to the memories of subjugated knowledges and the counternarratives
the immigrant pupils create, since memory can engender ‘insurgent consciousness’ and
contest unproblematic curricular practices (Kincheloe 1993). In my opinion, in a cogni-
tive and political sphere, we must subvert the privileged status of educational law, which
is legitimised by (and legitimates) teachers’ authority and Western knowledge trans-
mission at school. As a result of the sharing of personal stories from the girls’ family
albums, a list of subjugated knowledges emerged during the curriculum development
process: (1) the family album was reinterpreted by Beira, Oumaïma, Gabriela and Karen,
who placed their early childhood memories in the context of care relations and family
reconstitution during their migration journey; (2) the self, as embodied through material
culture and popular culture (clothing, personal objects and collections), was represented
in girls’ identities, as in the stories produced by Beira, Oumayma, Naujot, Carolina and
Tanzela; (3) the invention of both fantasy and real personal identities, in public and
private spaces through visual culture, occurred when Oumayma presented her collection
of idols, and Carolina and Aracely represented themselves in an urban space. In

Figure 2. Beira interprets the picture from her family album.

 Gender and Education 677

opposition to the conceptualisation of ‘official knowledge’, I understand this notion of

‘subjugated knowledges’ as Kincheloe defined it, according to Foucault, in the context
of possible curricular roles for black history:

Foucault would resurrect these subjugated knowledges: (1) history which has been
buried or disguised, typically a history of subjugation, conflict, and oppression lost in a
dominant theoretical framework or wiped out by a triumphant history of ideas; (2)
knowledges that have been disqualified as inferior to the dominant definitions of
scientificity, knowledges regarded as primitive by mainstream intellectuals. (Kincheloe
1993, 256)
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During the curriculum research process, the educators and researchers learned how to
elude personal inquiry-based teaching methods and sought to promote collective
conversations in order to avoid fixing knowledges from girls’ autobiographical narra-
tives. We realised that by empowering their diversity and learning through dialogue
in various subgroups, the girls’ autobiographical statements and interactions would
provide access to everyday life-knowledge that is not visible in a typical classroom.
For instance, after the teacher’s mediation, Carolina added that boys and men can also
be ‘angels’ in her culture; Karen concluded, after describing her picture, that she used
to play with cars because toys are for everybody, even if piñatas13 and toys were
distributed according to sexual difference, as at her birthday party. During the conver-
sation, the teacher attempted to dismantle various misconceptions or prejudices, as in
the case of Naujot’s group, which was asked about differences between the pupils’
families from a cultural, geographical, gender and religious perspective. Although the
Muslim boys felt curious and insisted on pointing out the Sikh religious body markings
in Naujot’s family picture, the teacher’s conclusion was that ‘it is a religious custom’.
Furthermore, he promoted self-reflective understandings, as illustrated at the end of
Gabriela’s statement: ‘I suppose my story means that my family moves around a lot.
Sometimes I like change, sometimes I don’t’. In avoiding ‘the subject of the West or
the West as Subject’, curriculum development allows us to imagine ‘the kind of Power
and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other Europe’ (Spivak 1988,
271–80)14 and to empower rather than ignore children’s subjugated knowledges:

Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of
imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge’, ‘a whole set of knowledges that
have been disqualified as inadequate to their tasks or insufficiently elaborated: naive
knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition
or scientificity’ (PK, 82 [Here Spivak refers to Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault]). This is not to describe ‘the way
things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the best
version of history. It is, rather, to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative
of reality was established as the normative one. (Spivak 1988, 281)

During the project, we carried out a conversational analysis of the learning process, in
which the pupils, the educators and the artists co-operated to produce personal, critical
and cross-cultural intertextual narratives.15 The analysis reveals that the official
stereotypes about immigrants in urban schools are socially constructed. In this project,
the immigrant girls produced non-fixed identity texts across a diverse range of
geographical, cultural, racial, gender, visual and historical subjective positions. In
other words, the dialogic curriculum generates new modes of teaching and learning
in which identity and differences are permanently negotiated and pupils’ hybrid,
 678 M. Rifà-Valls

multiple and contradictory experiences are mediated by both the local and the global.
For instance, Oumayma, who provided photos of two friends (representing different
nationalities and racial bodies), explained the plot of ‘Pasión de Gavilanes’16 based on
pictures of characters from the show, which she collects in a scrapbook that repro-
duces patterns of sexist, racial, ethnic and class dominance.17 The teacher then asked
the pupils to deconstruct the dramatic plot devices that subordinate women to men:
revenge, beautiful young women in relationships with older men, marriage, the stigma
of pregnant women, adultery, wealth, inheritance, gender passion and violence. The
pupils compared the situations in TV series with what they actually think or experi-
ence in their day-to-day lives: the role of their teachers, mothers and sisters as women
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workers or guardians and the desire for equal gender relations when they fall in love,
also in the case of pre-adolescents and non-heterosexual couples.
Oumayma and Gabriela simultaneously changed the production of normative iden-
Figure 3. Gabriela’s production of a visual autobiographical narrative.

tities generated by the consumption of television series since they wanted boys to call
them ‘chulas’ (low-class but high-power girls) rather than ‘pijas’ (silly rich girls)
because ‘chula’ also means ‘pretty’. In addition, various artworks dealing with iden-
tity and difference were posted on the front wall of the classroom,18 including Qajar
(1999) by Shadi Ghadirian and Then as Fountain (2004) by Alexander Apóstol. Most
of the pupils were impressed by these two artworks, and a comment by an art critic
(’Someone else’s personal experience can become our own’) triggered a spectatorship
process characterised by identification and displacement. In the end, Oumayma and
Gabriela interactively produced reflective statements and relocated themselves as
travelling from the real to the virtual, from the past and the present into the future,
while negotiating gender and cultural subjective positions that mediate in the produc-
tion of their visual autobiographical narratives as ‘nomadic’ pre-adolescents.

Gabriela: It looks like he’s on a balcony, in a city…

Oumayma: And she’s in a garden…
Teacher: What things does she have that you can also have?
Gabriela: Pepsi…

Figure 3. Gabriela’s production of a visual autobiographical narrative.

 Gender and Education 679

Oumayma: It could also been made by computer…

Gabriela: Nooo, it looks like a temple, it’s like a temple. It looks to me like … I
don’t know if it is a temple…
Teacher: Do you think she is in a real place or is it a drawing?
Gabriela: It’s a drawing because there is no distance between here and there. They
changed it.
Teacher: Why do you think that? You said before that there is a difference
between modern and old pictures, and I can see a sepia picture of an old
place and a Pepsi…
Gabriela: I think that it’s from today, but they changed the colour.
Teacher: And would you like to represent yourself like she does?
Oumayma: When my sister wears a chador, she has a similar face.
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Gabriela: I would like to know, for example, how the picture of me that I took now
will be seen in the future…
Oumayma: In my case, I don’t know if pictures in the future will be like they are
now, but I would like to see myself in the past…
Teacher: Well, if I have understood correctly, you want to see yourself in the
future but as you are now, and in your case, you want to know what you
will be like in the future, is that right?
Gabriela: Yes. Because our teachers often say that we talk like we are advanced.

Girls’ reconstruction of local/global identities through the interaction between

ethnic, racial, gender, age and social class subjective and learning positions
Other invisible stories emerged during the curriculum development process. I will
analyse these stories by confronting the dialogic curriculum used at this urban school
with a neocolonial educational system and disciplinary pedagogy (Spivak 1993). In
Western countries, while children’s rights are often legally guaranteed, curricular
practices usually dissolve diversity. Children’s agencies are not taken into account
because homogeneous classrooms are considered more effective in terms of cognitive
and cultural achievement. In a modern sense, even if children’s learnings and subjec-
tivities are not conceived in a disciplinary way and equal opportunities are promoted,
the idea of an emancipated, rational and liberal subject involved in critical pedagogy
facilitates the construction of a normalised identity. As a result, diversity in teaching
and learning processes declines and the curriculum fails to create ‘released spaces’ for
children’s imagination in terms of social reconstruction (Greene 2000). Consequently,
by reproducing a paternalistic gaze that constitutes the narratives of imperialism, the
modern pedagogical system simultaneously ‘rescues’ children and tacitly assumes
that they are subordinate ‘others’ who cannot speak for themselves. In this section, I
will analyse the girls’ narratives from the perspective of connecting the role of subju-
gated knowledges with the opportunity for a multiplicity of agencies in developing a
dialogic curriculum. I will take into account girls’ interpretations of global images of
identity in relation to the viewing of Shadi Ghadirian’s and Alexander Apóstol’s
artworks, from the perspective of rethinking childhood from diversity studies in
curriculum development:

Teacher: ‘Someone else’s personal experience can become our own.’ What do their
dresses look like?
Beira: He’s naked!
Teacher: And what is she like?
Beira: Is she dressed like this because she lives in another time?
Carolina: Because she lives in Morocco.
Oumaïma: Or Pakistan.
 680 M. Rifà-Valls

Teacher: Do you think he’s in the same place?

Carolina: He’s in a city, on top of something … I like this picture a lot. It reminds me
of my country and the houses there. I used to climb up the stairs to get to a
similar place when I was seven or eight. The boy is handsome as well, and
I like his body position and his trousers.

Historical, geographical, gender and cultural subjective relocations occurred and inter-
acted when different pupils compared the two artworks. On the one hand, many pupils
wanted to represent themselves as the muchacho portrayed by the Venezuelan artist.
They pointed out that ‘he is in a public space’ and ‘in a poor area of the city’ possibly
in Colombia, Barcelona or Bangladesh.19 On the other hand, the pupils felt that the
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woman portrayed by the Iranian artist was ‘indoors, at home’, i.e. living in Pakistan
or Morocco; in their view, the chador made her look like a close relative or a friend.
A sense of children’s nostalgia often emerged when the pupils linked their family
album pictures with the artworks, as in the case of Gabriela and Carolina, who wanted
to represent themselves with an object in their hands as an offering – like the fountain
or the Pepsi in the artworks – in a natural, cultural or autobiographical setting, in either
a new or an old place.
Masculine and feminine, public and private, urban and rural themes emerged in the
girls’ interpretations of clothes and body representations. For instance, Carolina said:
‘He looks like a strong boy, he does a lot of exercise, like in the TV series … They do
weight training’; Oumaïma added: ‘Yes, he does one, two, three … and repeats’.
Curricular practices at schools produce identity and differences in a similar way to
visual culture, which addresses the pupils as readers and consumers based on gender-
based pleasure and satisfaction: ‘No representations in the written and visual media
are gender-neutral. They either confirm or challenge the status quo through the ways
they construct or fail to construct images of femininity and masculinity’ (Weedon
1987, 97).
In addition, I will consider the politics of the performative (Butler 1997) in the
Figure 4. Selecting Apóstol and Ghadirian’s artworks: Carolina, Oumaïma, Karen and Tanzela’s pictures.

process of constructing children’s identities.20 Historically, children have been regu-

lated by adults in terms of social, economic, racial, gender and sexual concepts, and
even in pedagogical practices, which are also immersed in power–knowledge rela-
tions. From this perspective, performance – which is different from performativity –
could become a process of occupying and transiting through different subjective

Figure 4. Selecting Apóstol and Ghadirian’s artworks: Carolina, Oumaïma, Karen and
Tanzela’s pictures.
 Gender and Education 681

positions available to children in the learning process throughout the curriculum. In

the first statement transcribed below, Oumaïma singles out Apóstol’s artwork to mate-
rialise her embodied self through visual and musical culture, in a dialogic narrative
that alters the Latino roles for femininity and masculinity and disrupts Western white
male colonial and paternalistic narratives for children.

Oumaïma: I chose this picture because he looks like a singer named Daddy Yankee. He
is a muscular and handsome boy. He is the singer in a reggaeton band and
every day he wears a silver chain. I would like to represent myself with a
reggaeton group.
Teacher: Do you have any pictures of them?
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Oumaïma: Yes. I have posters and I’m going to put them in a mural with drawings and
song titles and lyrics.
Teacher: And what are you going to be like?
Oumaïma: I will dance like him and dress in hip-hop clothes. I will bring music and
two necklaces and three rings.

Moreover, two other artworks were shown to the children to promote questioning of
culturally privileged explanations and how they are generated (Spivak 1987b). These
artworks, Untitled (1984) by Youssouf Sogodogo and Odessa (1993) by Rineke
Dijkstra, provided different subjective positions for the viewers. Dijkstra’s caption for
the artwork was: ‘I do not take pictures of people who think they are beautiful … They
cannot surprise me’. This sentence dismantles the visual pleasure of reading/produc-
ing visual narratives which is reinforced by the assumption of women as fetish objects.
The second statement narrates Beira’s identification with the racial body in
Sogodogo’s image. Sogodogo portrayed the hair plaits of his daughter’s friends and
of other women in his Malian community, in a quotidian Africanist photographic
gesture that resists a eugenetic gaze.

Beira: I like the way she is dressed up and how she combs her hair. I like this image
because I didn’t know it was possible to wear your hair like that. I like it.
Teacher: How do you want to represent yourself?
Beira: I would represent myself with a red curtain at the back.
Teacher: What can you bring to represent yourself?
Beira: A saint. I will wear my skirt and I will bring the saint I have in my room at
home.
Teacher: And would you like to have a hairstyle like that?
Beira: With plaits, my mom knows how to plait hair.

As immigrants from the Dominican Republican and Morocco, respectively, Beira and
Oumaïma represented themselves using a photo from their family album depicting a
birthday celebration. In the photos, they were both wearing a similar long white dress
made by their grandmothers, in addition to a tiara. Both girls selected these photos
because they were together with their parents, who were usually absent. However,
although they chose similar photos, the strategies they used to create a visual autobio-
graphical narrative were completely different, i.e. the positions of their body, the
scene and the gaze.21 If we analyse the production of autobiographical narratives
further, Oumayma and Oumaïma, who are both from Morocco and are ‘almost white’
Muslim girls, identify with Latin American idols through visual and musical culture.22
Moreover, Oumaïma’s visual autobiographical text introduced reggaeton bands whose
lyrics narrate violent and sexist stories that place women as sex objects. In this situa-
tion, these bands serve to empower Oumaïma’s identity as a European girl.
 682 M. Rifà-Valls
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Figure 5. Dialoguing with Sogodogo and Dijkstra’s artworks: Beira’s autobiographical

narrative.

Carolina and Beira, both of whom are black, Catholic and Latina, identified with
Figure 6. Oumaïma’s autobiographical narrative.

the works by Apóstol and Sogodogo, respectively. They represented themselves with
a religious gesture – holding a candle and a saint – that coexists with popular and secular
references, such as the Carnival parade in Carolina’s case and the Barbie printed on
Beira’s jacket. Gabriela’s autobiographical narrative also visualised a complex process
of identity production by immigrant girls. She comes from South America; after she
told us that she too had lived in many places during her family’s migration, she decided
to represent herself in a scene showing a historical picture of Barcelona, thereby cross-
ing various social, gender and cultural places. After looking at Ghadirian’s artwork,
Gabriela told us that she was interested in ‘learning about the cultures of the past’.
Indeed, diverse tactics for producing visual autobiographical narratives challenged the
neocolonial and disciplinary educational system (Spivak 1993), which has been
replaced by deconstructive postcolonial pedagogy.

Spacing and temporalising difference in curriculum development and film

research to empower immigrant girls’ narratives

Tim Mitchell has suggested that the typical Orientalist attitude was ‘the world as exhibi-
tion’. The ‘new orientalism’ views ‘the world as immigrant’. (Spivak 1993, 64)
 Gender and Education 683
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Figure 6. Oumaïma’s autobiographical narrative.

According to Barone and Eisner (2006), arts-based educational research serves to

improve qualitative research into a variety of aesthetic elements, e.g. evocative,
contextual, communicative and generative features. In this project, research empow-
ered the reconceptualisation of knowledge and subjectivity through the idea of the
curriculum as an aesthetic text, as well as a discourse on identity, race, gender and
sexuality. Specifically, the film ethnographic research supported the reconstruction of
girls’ learning experiences and transferences through the process of producing their
autobiographical narratives. Deconstructive visual ethnography enhanced the plan-
ning and development of the curriculum. For instance, after analysing the gaze that
mediated in our video documentary practices, we were open to promoting a dialogic
narrative of curriculum and pedagogy based on multiplicity, creativity and indetermi-
nacy. Immigrant girls interactively created their own visual autobiographical narra-
tives, while a multiplicity of agencies emerged in developing a dialogic curriculum.
In addition, the pupils co-operatively produced video images that challenged and
resisted the curriculum research process. As Ellsworth (1997) has suggested, I also
examined how research into the pupils’ readings and interpretations can be inspired
by media studies as a dialogic process.
In this collaborative project, shooting, scoring, framing, picturing, interviewing,
Figure 7. Carolina’s autobiographical narrative.

transcribing and editing were among our tasks as educators, students, artists and
researchers. Using video-based strategies to narrate curriculum development allowed
us to reflect on the relationship between what kind of teaching and learning situations
 684 M. Rifà-Valls
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Figure 7. Carolina’s autobiographical narrative.

we would like to represent and how we represent these processes. Deconstructive

visual ethnography based on feminist post-structuralism and postcolonialism
promotes alternative modes of telling others about our identities and diversities. In
other words, ‘textual experiments are not so much about solving the crisis of represen-
tation as troubling the very claims to represent’ (Lather 2001, 481). Therefore, tran-
scribing film sequences from a deconstructive approach implies focusing on repetition
and différance. At the same time, the process of editing a video narrative transforms
the interpretation of data in terms of multiplicity and micronarrative.23 Even if subal-
tern consciousness ‘cannot be recovered’, it could be ‘the blank part of the text, the
necessarily indeterminate index of a future epoch of difference’ (Spivak 1987a, 204),
as in the following conversation based on Sogodogo’s and Dijkstra’s artworks, or in
the Pakistani girls’ narratives.

Kevin: Who is she/he?

Aracely: She’s showing her hair.
Kevin: He looks like a woman…
Teacher: Why do you say that?
Kevin: Because she looks like a woman and like a man, look at his face.
Mahbuh: He looks like a woman, like a transsexual.
Aracely: He has a delicate face, and his hair is…
Teacher: It could be because he is from Ukraine. Where is she from?
Aracely: From the Dominican Republic.
 Gender and Education 685
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Figure 8. Tanzela’s autobiographical narrative.

Kevin: From Africa.

Teacher: Do you know somebody who looks like her?
Naima: Beira.
Teacher: It is a practice in Beira’s culture, and also in Oumayma’s friend’s…
Aracely: In my family, the custom is to comb long hair.

As Spivak has pointed out, in every textual production ‘there is the itinerary of a
Figure 8. Tanzela’s autobiographical narrative.

constantly thwarted desire to make the text explain. The question then becomes: What
is this explanation as it is constituted by and as it effects a desire to conserve the expla-
nation itself; what are the “means devised in the interest of the problem of a possible
objective knowledge?”’ (1987b, 105). From the perspective of educational success, I
must acknowledge the curriculum’s failure since the project was not undertaken at the
school for a long time. From the perspective of connecting the educational processes
with video ethnography, I discovered that the creation of ephemeral spaces and the
overcranking of time in curriculum development empower new places of learning
diversity, biography, community and visuality.24 In the end, the borders between the
dialogic curriculum and ethnographic research disappeared, producing polyphonic
and multi-layered texts of identity and diversity. This process allowed us to transform
conditions of impossibility into possibility (Spivak 1987a). Decolonising methodolo-
gies in researching childhood and education (Cannella and Viruru 2004) generated
deconstructive possibilities to re-occupy and re-invent multiple diverse identities for
immigrant girls.
 686 M. Rifà-Valls

Notes
1. I will use the first person when referring to the analysis presented in this article, although
the research is the result of a complex collaborative educational project. I wish to thank
Xavier Giménez, Laura Trafí, Irene Tourinho and Marcelo Schellini for the opportunity to
learn from research based on dialogic pedagogy.
2. For instance, over the past decade, this neighbourhood had to demonstrate that its social
institutions and adults are not implicated in a global paedophilia scandal. More recently,
residents had to reassure the public that the Raval is not a centre for Islamist terrorism, after
14 Pakistani people were arrested in the neighbourhood.
3. The educational services include the integrated educational plan for the area, the resource
centre for professional educators, educational psychologists and social workers, and the co-
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ordination of a linguistic and cultural cohesion plan. Other public and private childcare
centres, health centres, shelters and charitable institutions complete the range of social
services in the area. Furthermore, as regards the Rosa Sensat Association (a Catalan move-
ment for progressive education), the role of local educational services in co-operation with
social services, and the many cultural and immigrant associations and critical activist
groups, is also noteworthy.
4. In the early 1930s, between 30 and 40% of children in Barcelona did not go to school, and
the most common locations for schools were dark flats with traditional teachers, except for
a few new schools based on modern progressive pedagogy. For this reason, in 1931, the
municipality inaugurated 11 schools in Barcelona and 8000 vacancies for pupils were
created as a result of a plan launched at the turn of the century.
5. The 2006 census for the Raval recorded 48,569 immigrants in a population of 113,154 inhab-
itants. According to the official website of the census, Barcelona had 1,600,000 inhabitants.
The Jaume Bofill Foundation (Ferrer and Albaigés 2008) reported that 61.7% of pupils attend
public schools in Catalonia due to the increase in immigrant families but also reported that
immigrant pupils are inequitably distributed in public schools (17.5%) compared to private
schools (4.4%). In addition, the Foundation’s annual report noted that although there is a
large concentration of immigrants in Catalonia, implying a visibly accelerated process of
inclusion in primary education, the level of public expenditure on education is among the
lowest in Spain: only 2.2% of GDP, compared with 3.80% in the USA or 3.98% in the EU.
6. In a previous project focused on understanding critical photography with immigrant pupils
(2004–5 academic year), we promoted two key ideas for organising the primary school
curriculum: the reconstruction of the pupils’ identities, memories and migrations; and
moving across urban spaces, work cultures and communities, with fourth and sixth-grade
pupils, respectively (see Rifà-Valls and Trafí 2006).
7. Critical theory has promoted new hegemonic subjectivities, based on the presupposition of
a fixed, unified, rational, emancipatory, authentic and coherent identity.
8. Catachresis is a rhetorical figure that designates a thing that does not have a name using
another name. In its original Greek sense, it means ‘abusive use’.
9. As Lather has pointed out, ‘the demand for voice also has much more to do with subjugated
knowledges and multiple fractured subjectivities, the unheard/unhearable voices of Spivak’
(2001, 484).
10. I have transcribed a selection of the personal stories that the girls constructed from their
photos in order to clarify how the pupils started the process of producing visual autobio-
graphical narratives. From my point of view, by describing and interpreting these pictures
– as well as the video ethnographic documents – we are also working on visuality and we
are able to re-create the images. In addition, I will provide some visual examples of these
personal photos (Figures 2–5) and the girls’ autobiographical narratives.
11. The ‘Lunnis’ is a very popular programme for children on Spanish television based on the
Muppets.
12. We can provisionally use posh (pija) and stuck-up (chula) in this sentence, however chula
in Spanish can be a compliment.
13. A piñata is a candy-filled container that is hung from the ceiling and hit with a rod during
festivities.
14. In this sentence, Spivak refers to the impossibility for French (Western) intellectuals to
imagine the Other, because they produce the Other (of Europe) at the same time as they are
involved in the international division of labour.
 Gender and Education 687

15. I will apply the analysis of subjugated knowledges to the conversation of different groups
through contemporary art, after a Brazilian photographer visited the school – an immigrant
artist who shared his album of memories with the pupils.
16. A popular Colombian soap opera.
17. I wish to note that both boys and girls in the classroom were familiar with these television
series.
18. Pupils interpreted all of the pieces, but the teacher invited them to place their images in a
dialogue with the artworks. Other artworks by Guilliam Wearing, Meysam Mohammadi,
Miquel Angel Gaüeca, Dieter Appelt, Pooyan Alimohamadi and Jo Spence were selected
to visualise gender and cultural differences with the aim of promoting a conversation based
on the artists’ subjective positions.
19. The following questions were mediated by the teacher in the conversation: Do you think
he is in a poor area of the city? Do you know another district besides the Raval? They
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compared the district with other districts and other countries, because they identified when
houses were built in a poor area. They also discussed the idea proposed by Apóstol: ‘People
make a city’.
20. For more specific information, see Redman (2005).
21. The teacher asked the pupils how they wanted to represent themselves. The teacher,
together with a professional artist and the researchers, then supported the pupils as they
created their autobiographical narratives.
22. They learn Latino culture from their families, e.g. from her mother in the case of Oumayma’s
television series, and from her uncle and father in the case of Oumaïma’s rap music.
23. Multiple visual documents were produced by the participants (educators, pupils, artists and
researchers). I experimented with creating visual diverse identity micronarratives by
disrupting the production of a unitary and totalising narrative in curriculum research.
24. In late 2007, we presented the education and research process in a participatory exhibition
entitled ‘Narratives of Childhood. Biographies, Places and Visualities’ for sharing and
discussing children’s narratives of curriculum in the community. In that exhibition, we
used the notion of ‘places of learning’, following Ellsworth, that ‘reconsiders pedagogy as
the impetus behind the particular movements, sensations, and affects of bodies/mind/brains
in the midst of learning, and it explores the embodied experiences that pedagogy elicits and
plays host to: experiences of being radically in relation to one’s self, to others, and to the
world’ (Ellsworth 2005, 2).

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