Bang on the System: Teacher as Big Homie

• In Event: 54.047 - Rethinking "Social Justice" Teaching: A Critical Analysis of Teachers' Lives and Teacher Leadership

Abstract

In the front of my classroom hung the mantra, “If you’re feeling gangsta, bang on the system.” Rather than silence and indict gang culture as simply criminal, this mantra recognizes that gangs are a symptom, not a cause of violence (Olate, 2012). This paper re-imagines gangstas – or in this case, the Big Homie – as enlightened, politically active teachers of color who are committed to a greater political cause. California street gangs, mainly those in Los Angeles, endearingly refer to older gang members who serve as mentors for younger gang members as the big homie. Big homies draw on their experience and expertise to mentor lil homies with resources, guidance, and inspiration in order for the latter to more effectively navigate their social conditions as aspiring gang members. From a Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) perspective, Big Homies provide the navigational, aspirational, resistant, social, linguistic, and even familial capital that Lil Homies often long for given the material conditions of their community contexts.
This teacher inquiry (Allen, 1999) was designed as part of a larger critical participatory action research (Morrell, 2006) intervention that resulted in a corpus of qualitative data collected as part of a five-year qualitative dataset. The paper focuses on aspects of data where I utilized my own urban and history of gang-related sensibilities as a tool for critically engaging students in socially transformative learning. My cultural intuition (Delgado-Bernal, 1999) served as the foundation for my work as an educator. This analysis serves as a mirror for others to reflect on their own lived experience, how their experiences shape who they are today, and to be clear with how their identities as people shape their political purpose as educators.
With this in mind, this paper answers the following research questions: How can drawing on the assets and cultural wealth of “street” sensibilities captivate student engagement and learning in ways that traditional teacher identities and school curriculum does not? What implications does this have for social justice educators at-large? Data-driven assertions suggest that students believe that teachers who act as big homies in their lives understand their reality in deeply intimate ways and, as a result, can more effectively offer practical, and critical, solutions to their problems. Further, this type of classroom leadership is a powerful approach to channeling urban students’ personal frustrations and social dissatisfaction against the very social system that undermines their existence - or in this sense, it is a powerful approach to teaching students to bang on the system. This paper will argue that we must consider the implications of social justice teachers learning from Big Homies in the broadest terms possible – presupposing the latter’s leadership style as worthy of scholarly scrutiny and intellectual interrogation – so that the cultural bias that prevents dominant culture from comprehending their significance is recognized as part of the culture that big homie teachers attack through their rhetoric, anger, and their fiery, prophetic insights.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco