From Santa María to Santería: Honoring All of Our Religious Heritages Through the Curriculum

• In Event: 81.012 - Afro-Latinidades, Spiritualities, and Transformative Education: The Intersections of Afro-Indigenous Religious Practice and Educational Praxis

Abstract

Culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogy requires that schools use curricular tools that reflect student identities (Slee, 2010; MacIntyre, 2010; Jabbar & Mirza, 2017; Pirbhai-llich et al., 2017; Paris & Alm, 2017). Although an increased focus on culturally responsive pedagogy ensures that our most disenfranchised students’ ethnic and cultural identities are reflected in the curriculum, little work has been done to research the impact of mirroring student religious experiences within the classroom. Whereas the majority religions are addressed across curricular areas, lesser-known, African-origin spiritual religions are largely ignored by texts used in the classroom, rendering practicing students invisible. Thus, it is imperative that teachers engage with students to learn not just about the students’ national and ethnic origins but also to help validate the spiritual communities of origin. This paper aims to provide K-12 educators with a framework that will enable them to address the diversity of Afro-Latinx students’ religions within the curriculum.


This paper utilizes a social learning theoretical framework to posit that all elements of identity must be addressed throughout all of the students’ educational contexts in order for them to develop a sense of self (Barclay, 1982; Tatum, 1992; Doran, 2014).
In this study, 15 adults with a spiritist background were interviewed. Of the 15, 5 were Catholic with
spiritist tendencies. The remaining ten were strictly of a spiritual religion and practice.

The study found that adults who attended majority-minority K-12 schools had a more positive experience embracing their religions. Students at majority-white schools expressed a tendency towards religions that were not similar to the religious practices of the home. In the majority-minority schools, students reported finding students of similar backgrounds and being able to have discussions of all elements of identity within classroom contexts. Although that is not explicitly culturally responsive pedagogy and merely a response to social learning, it can be argued that students were reacting to the environment, in accordance with social learning theory (Barclay, 1982). Of the fifteen individuals interviewed, eight expressed a shift in their spiritual and self identity development because of their schooling. Six of the eight expressed a tendency towards a more traditional religion - primarily Islam or Christianity, as a result of the stigma associated with spiritually aligned religions. The concept of intersectionality, which considers the intersection of different axes of identity including but not limited to race, class, gender, immigration status, and sexuality, becomes crucial to understanding the Afro-Latinx student experiences; these different axes of identity may also be seen as categories of difference (Hancock, 2007) . Furthermore, Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) describes how these categories of difference, which she also labels as categories of discrimination, interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels. Thus, through this framework, and the concept of intersectionality, draw attention to the concurrent and interacting effects of how categories of difference inform the educational experiences of racially stigmatized groups.

Author

• Maria Roberta Diaz, Central Queens Academy