Critical Ethnic Studies Pedagogy in East Los Angeles

• In Event: 73.061 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 73.061-2 - Toward Pedagogies for Liberation and Transformation: The Possibilities of Humanizing Pedagogies

Abstract

Serving a culturally rich Chicano/a-Latino/a community in the Eastside of Los Angeles offers educators opportunities to design Ethnic Studies units that address student’s history, culture, and humanity. As a result of the nations’ over testing culture, and standardized state curriculum teachers are restricted to freely build student community literacy. However, through teacher determination, an interdisciplinary approach, and partnering with the local community builds strength and empowerment in students and teachers. Through the building of alliances across cultural communities, educators can supersede irrational and dehumanizing hegemonic forces (Darder, 2002).

The designing of the Community Cultural Treasures project in a Los Angeles Eastside high school brought together teachers, non-profit community arts and literacy directors to create a project that addresses the life, culture, local history and voice of students. Students learned to identify community-based cultural assets, and generate empowering community knowledge through a critical textual product (Morrell, 2008) that offers an alternative and liberating counter-narrative to the dominant discourse. Students published a book of biographies, poems, narratives, and interviews that challenge racist notions of their neighborhood and shared their work to community members at a local theater arts space. To generate the content for the book, students were guided in setting up interviews and connecting to community cultural treasures, being individuals who have made positive contributions to the culture and people of East Los Angeles.

Unlike alienating curriculum, this project had the support of community members, which included artists, activists, musicians, educators, families, and leaders. Through this nurturing and caring approach in building student skills and scholarship students were further revealed to their community cultural wealth while contributing to the struggle for racial justice (Yosso, 2005). This project aims at highlighting to educators who are working to create humanizing curriculum the crucial importance to not develop projects in isolation, rather work in solidarity (Freire, 1998) with the community they serve, including students. The project also aimed at developing in students a love for their community and shift youth identities as poets, writers, scholars, and cultural advocates.

This paper draws from a qualitative study of high school student interviews and focus groups of Chicana/o-Latino/a students who have engaged in community-based Ethnic Studies projects in a Los Angeles Eastside school from 2010-2014. The paper reports on a qualitative reflection of a community cultural project that involved high school students, educators, community members, and cultural workers.

The findings offer implications for critical Ethnic Studies pedagogy and curriculum development. Curriculum that is grounded in community, culture, and include student critical textual production (Morrell, 2008) and distribution of their product contribute to student critical consciousness, community literacy, cultural empowerment, and humanization.

This work is significant, as urban public schools continue to move towards non-white pluralities, curricula needs to address the cultural needs of its students. Ethnic Studies offers a humanizing and empowering approach to education, challenging the historical role of schools that has racially oppressed and systemically alienated Students of Color.

Author

• Jorge Lopez, Claremont Graduate University