'The collision of two worlds': when a teacher-centered facilitator meets a student-centered pedagogy

Social aspects among Mexican society are based on gender hierarchy influencing every decision-making process. I was taught from a young age that every decision needed to come from me. While I had the opportunity to learn an activist approach to working with youth during my doctoral journey, I never thought it would challenge the epistemology of my personal and professional life. An activist approach is based on critical and feminist pedagogies. As such, Chicana feminist theory invited me to question what has been inherited, learned and imposed throughout life, and how this created a conflict between what I was taught and what I was learning. The purpose of this study was to explore the challenges of a teacher-centered facilitator implementing a student-centered pedagogy. This paper is the result of a four-year critical autoethnography project using an activist approach for working with youth in an after-school sports club. Findings are divided into three sections: (1) learning to understand the influence of cultural backgrounds on becoming an activist teacher/researcher over time, (2) how to negotiate the discomfort and challenges faced in the process of moving from a teacher-centered to student-centered positionality and (3) moving from discomfort to comfort with a student-centered approach. Through this process I began to take inventory of my historical upbringing, creating a space for self-reflexivity that allowed me to deconstruct 'old ways' and merge them with 'new'.

Automated summary

This study examines the challenges faced by a teacher-centered facilitator implementing a student-centered pedagogy, and presents findings from a four-year critical autoethnography project that used an activist approach for working with youth in an after-school sports club.