Developing Civic Identities and Literacies in a Secondary Ethnic Studies Course

• In Event: Critical Consciousness and Identity: The Benefits of Ethnic Studies Courses for K–16 Latinx Students

Abstract

Given the longstanding abrasive racial inequity in K-12 curricula (Sleeter, 2005) and standards (Heilig, Brown, & Brown, 2012), increasing educators are looking towards Ethnic Studies as a means to enhance humanizing literacy experiences for all students. This paper examines a photovoice project (Wang, 1997) in a high school Ethnic Studies course and is guided by the question: How do students use photovoice as a multimodal storytelling platform to articulate who they are as racialized young people and the social issues that matter to them?

This study’s methodology is grounded in New Literacy Studies (Street, 1995) and theories of borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987) and border thinking (Mignolo, 2000) to examine students’ multiliterate practices of resistance in colonial spaces. Data hails from a critical ethnographic classroom study (Carspecken, 1996) in Southern California where all of the students were Latinx, from immigrant households and bilingual. Data sources include semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and students’ photovoice productions. I used a version of Woodgate & Kreklewetz’s (2012) three-step approach to photovoice data analysis which incorporated thematic analysis and coding.

Findings convey multimodal literacies of social awareness, engaged writing, and critical civic identity development. Through their photovoice projects, students shared how they came to see themselves as agents of change in their communities. Furthermore, findings demonstrate how the project allowed students to bring their voices in conversation with hegemonic discourses around law enforcement in their community.

As school districts across California work to implement Ethnic Studies courses, this paper contributes to the paucity of empirical research providing curricular windows into the power and possibilities of these academically rigorous classes. Moreover, it adds to the growing literature on critical pedagogies of Ethnic Studies (de los Rios, López, Morrell, 2015) and supports existing grassroots efforts to maintain California’s recent legislative sanctioning of these salient courses.

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Riverside