Toward an Ethnic Studies Portraiture

• In Event: 34.033 - "A People's Scholarship": Portraiture and Possibilities for Liberatory Educational Research

Abstract

Objectives & Research Questions
This paper advances Portraiture as a methodology for educational research to investigate the impact and influence of Ethnic Studies on Filipina/o American teachers. Specifically, I describe an emergent and intersectional framework that I am naming Ethnic Studies Portraiture that addresses interlocking systems of power namely U.S. imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The study presents ethnic studies portraits of Filipino American K-12 public school teachers working in San Francisco and Los Angeles communities.
Research questions include:
1) How has Ethnic Studies shaped Filipina/o American teachers’ pedagogies?
2) What practices do Filipina/o American teachers utilize in their classrooms that connect Ethnic Studies with content?
3) How does an Ethnic Studies Portrait of teachers advance our understandings of Ethnic Studies-trained teachers?

Theory
Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, 1997), critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012; Kohli, 2009; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995); and Ethnic Studies frameworks (Lowe, 1996; Rodriguez, 2010) were used to guide study design and analyses. For Filipino Americans, Ethnic Studies offers insights to the complexities surrounding questions of race, racialization, and ethnicity shaped by legacies of war (Baldoz, 2011; Shaw and Francia, 2002) and im/migration (Buenavista and Gonzales, 2010; Rodriguez, 2010). Critical race theory’s challenge against ahistoricism (Buenavista, 2010) and insistence on intersectional perspectives (Solórzano, 1997) accounts for how the experiences of Filipino American teachers can be understood against complex systems and racialized histories. Taken together, this assemblage demands thinking across disciplines to inform how we might better comprehend and recognize Ethnic Studies’ role in in troubling “equal” educational opportunities.

Methods/Sources
Data were derived from semi-structured interviews K-12 Filipino American teachers working in urban schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles and includes teacher reflections, multimodal artifacts, and focus groups. Teachers were selected based on criteria that included their knowledge of Filipino American history and community issues, backgrounds in Ethnic Studies, and experience working with students from historically marginalized communities.

Significance
Centering the experiences of Filipino American teachers of this study, I present Ethnic Studies Portraits drawing from critical race studies and counterstorytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002); performance studies’ “performative witnessing” (Madison, 2010); kuwento (Jocson, 2008) and community responsive literacies (Curammeng, Lopez, and Tintiangco-Cubales, 2016). Ethnic Studies Portraiture: (a) blends art, science, and interdisciplinarity through the construction of portraits as collages - constellations of multiple histories, experiences, and social locations; (b) is an expression of how systems of power structures identities and circumstances; and (c) concerned with Ethnic Studies values of love, respect, hope, solidarity, self-determination, critical consciousness, and community. Findings from this study contributes new insights toward: 1) novel methodological approaches for examining teacher praxis and 2) insights for bridging Ethnic Studies in educational research. Such an understanding attends to the conference theme: “whether problems associated with unequal opportunity and the methods used to study them are conceptualized to capture the diversity and complexity of circumstances.” To engage such complexities innovative approaches such as Ethnic Studies Portraiture must be explored.

Author

• Edward Ryan Curammeng, California State University - Dominguez Hills