Kuwentuhan as Method and Practice in Education Research

CFSC celebrates a new publication from Dr. Rose Ann Gutierrez, graduating senior at UC Davis, Hazel Piñon and, graduate from UCLA, Trisha Valmocena!

Gutierrez, R. A. E., Piñon, H., & Valmocena, M. T. (2023). Co-creating knowledge with undocumented Filipino students: Kuwentuhan as research method. New Directions for Higher Education, 2023(203), 77-92. ⁠http://doi.org/10.1002/he.20478⁠

This conversation features the authors in conversation about their article and Kuwentuhan as a method of data collection. Their bios are below:

Rose Ann Rico Eborda Gutierrez is an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research is informed by a Pinay epistemology and positionality as a 1.5-generation immigrant, first-generation college student, and the only daughter of working-class Pilipino immigrants. Her critical analytical lens as a race scholar in higher education undergird her resolve to improve the conditions and opportunities of historically oppressed communities across the lifespan through educational research and practice. Her broader research agenda examines the relationship between knowledge, race, and social transformation in higher education contexts. She seeks to understand how racial inequities in education are reserved at the intersection of and in relationship with other systems of oppression, how students navigate these systems using embodied epistemologies, and what the role higher education institutions play in shaping student pathways and outcomes across P-20. She focuses on low-income, immigrant, immigrant-origin, undocumented, and first-generation Students of Color, and more specifically, Asian American and Pacific Islander students. Her interdisciplinary research about racial equity in higher education and intersectional justice is anchored by critical theories and critical qualitative methodologies.

Marie Trisha Valmocena is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Education, and Community Engagement and Social Change. Their academic work and research focuses on the experiences of Undocumented (Im)Migrants and the political, economic, and social factors that lead to migration, oppression, and exploitation especially those of Filipino migrants. They are also an activist and leader in the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti-feudal National Democratic Movement of the Philippines. Trisha is an undocumented Filipino and informs their research and activism through their own experiences of navigating the same country that continues to put the Philippines in a subservient and semi-colonial state as well as the stories of struggle and resistance they have gathered through community organizing in Southern California where the highest concentration of Filipinos outside of the Philippines resides.

Hazel Piñon is a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis, majoring in Sociology with a minor in Asian American Studies. Her forced lived experience as a 1.5-generation immigrant, with an Undocumented status, has shaped her analytical lens through an anti-capitalist and decolonialist perspective. She challenges oppressive hierarchal structures by foregrounding humanness and uplifting our existence despite conventions and authority.