Will You Stand for Me? Transformative Rites of Passage in an Urban High School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Teaching for Transformation and Conscientization

Abstract

This paper reports a case study of a small, urban high school that implements firewalks – innovative, community-centered rites of passage – where youth engage in public reflection on their personal and academic development. Drawing from anthropological scholarship on rites of passage and asset-based, social justice oriented approaches to empowering low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students, the author offers a description of the enactment of firewalks and posits that such rituals promote students’ self-awareness, resilience, peer support, sense of belonging, and engagement as learners and community members. Additionally, the paper explores how firewalks reinforce the school’s cultura, specifically its emphasis on cultivating students’ habits of life, work, and mind in order to equip youth to interrupt injustice and inequity.

Author

• Marnie Curry, University of California - Santa Cruz