Re-presenting and Rethinking Neighborhood Assets: Community Mapping With English-only and English-learner Parents as a Basis for Curricular Innovation

• In Event: Codifications of Reality as Educational Tools for Critical Consciousness: Retheorizing Freire Through Praxis

Abstract

This project was implemented in an urban professional development school where the school partner was a charter school formed to provide a dual language immersion (Spanish/English) program to a mostly low income and Latino population (African Americans comprise 7% of the enrollment, Whites 3% and Filipinos 2%). This charter school emerged entirely out of a grassroots movement that crossed ethnic and linguistic lines and was organized largely to resist efforts by the local city district to eradicate its bilingual programs. The charter school received considerable support from the partner university, long an advocate for bilingual education and bilingual teacher certification.
The victory celebration for charter approval was brief, quickly giving way to the hard work of creating a curriculum using social justice and dual language development frameworks. The coordinating team (teachers and teacher educators) was committed to creating an authentic process that genuinely captured the “talk” of the community; the team eventually created a plan that drew heavily from Paulo Freire’s detailed descriptions and depictions of codifications and from the Rapid Rural Assessment Protocol.
This essay focuses on a mapping activity in which two parent groups created maps of the community, and on an accompanying oral history project conducted with community elders, leaders, and community-nominated “historians.” The mapping activity yielded two large maps, created on 5 ft. x 5 ft whiteboards. The two maps, and the process by which each group completed its task, were starkly different and revealed significant and compelling differences across ethnic, racial, gender, language and social class subjectivities. More revealing, however, was the vast difference between the depiction of the community by the two parent groups and the ways in which all of the coordinating team members experienced and envisioned the community. The contrast brought into sharp focus the class and race privileges of the coordinating team members and unearthed deficit views that they still harbored about the school community, despite years of work to achieve a more critical consciousness.
This re-presentation of the community by the two parent groups to the coordinating team reinforced the absolute importance of engaging with the “talk” of the community, and it framed the development of a protocol and plan for the second phase of our effort: the oral histories. Ultimately, both activities helped teachers and their university partners distill a set of curricular themes (cultural assets, leadership, advocacy for change) that teachers then used to develop units of instruction and classroom materials. But beyond these important practical and operational concerns, this process also further legitimized the parent community as an important intellectual resource for the school and strengthened the collaborative foundation already being co-constructed by teachers and families at the school. It grounded the actions of the teachers and teacher educators, holding them accountable to their own concientização and to the school’s founding principles, rooted in community advocacy, engagement and mobilization. Finally, it generated a wealth of questions that became compelling and generative lines of inquiry for teacher professional development and for classroom curriculum.

Author

• Pia I. Wong, California State University - Sacramento