The Rio Grande region lies on the US border between Texas and Mexico and is served by the University of Texas at the Rio Grande Valley, a Hispanic Serving University (HSI) where over 25 percent of students are Hispanic/Latinx.

The UTRGV Department of Science reached out to [bc] last year to help adjust one of their projects that had been disrupted by COVID. Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, the aim of this project is to provide the faculty with a deeper understanding of the RGV and by extension their students, then measure how this training affects curriculum and student outcomes. Normally, this training would take place at a 3-day retreat -- but due to COVID, the department had to shift gears to a virtual option. In talking through their objectives and audience, [bc] recommended recreating the content of the retreat through a StoryMap.

The StoryMap recreates the storytelling and highlighting of local places and culture within the RGV, connecting this context to methods of teaching Latinx communities.

The StoryMap will cover four categories:

Place - What is the RGV? What is the history, what are its significant places, the ecology and history of development?
Culture - What are the key essences of the RGV? This section explores the role of family and children as well as water in the RGV.
Pedagogy - This section will focus on the history of education in the RGV, acknowledging the history of children being reprimanded for speaking Spanish at school and the trauma associated with this history.
University as an institution and how it’s seeking to better serve its Latinx population through curriculum development, campus offerings, and more.

This project is set to wrap in the next couple of months. We look forward to learning the results from the study to understand how this type of resource can be used to benefit educators and students of HSIs.

Check out some of these historic images of the RGV that are featured in the StoryMap!

Photo courtesy Museum of South Texas History

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