For Us, by Us: Ethnic Studies as Self-Determination in Chicago

• In Event: 34.045 - Healing Isn't a Metaphor: Centering Healing as Resistance Within Critical Racial Affinity Group Spaces

Abstract

The exclusion, surveillance, objectification, silencing, and other forms of subordination experienced by preservice teachers of Color in teacher education constitute forms of material and epistemological violence (Solorzano, 1997; Teo, 2010), a violence that is instrumental to the project of preserving White racial hegemony. Teachers of Color are subjected to the same/similar forms of racial violence while working in K-12 schools (Kohli, 2016a; Matias & Liou, 2015), including alienation, lack of support, and racist practices in hiring and performance evaluation. As such, teachers of Color emerge from their experiences in teacher education and K-12 schools in need of communities where they can seek radical healing, reclaim their ancestral ways of knowing, and strive toward the self-determination of themselves and the youth and communities they serve. Autonomous spaces are needed for teachers to connect and build networks of similarly-minded colleagues who care for and are committed to one another in the midst of navigating dehumanizing institutions (Martinez, Valdez & Cariaga, 2016). These spaces allow educators to bring their whole selves and to engage in collective healing and professional learning, grounded in a loving and liberatory praxis (Pour-Khorshid, 2016). Counter-hegemonic educational projects that are firmly rooted in ethnic studies are “gestures of rebellion” that promote collective transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing, which act as models for critical de-imperial education (Tintiangco-Cubales and Curammeng, 2018).

As a founding member of a grassroots collective of educators and community organizers of color, I offer an autoethnographic account of our journey. My research methodology is informed by Pinay feminist scholars and activists Tintiangco-Cubales & Sacramento (2009), and what they have termed Pinayist pedagogical praxis and is an articulation, reclaiming, and interrogation of my own journey of decolonizing and how that journey shapes my Pinayist subjectivity as a scholar-activist, education organizer, and co-struggler. The collective’s movement is contextualized in recognition of the historical, social, political, geographic and economic realities of Chicago and the erosion of its majority-youth-of-Color public education system as a result of large-scale neoliberal education policy and urban restructuring over the last four decades (Lipman, 2011; Lipman, 2015; Picower & Mayorga, 2015; Stovall, 2015). The mission of the collective is to reinvigorate a K-12 ethnic studies movement in Chicago. We believe that ethnic studies—as education, as a social movement, and as a way of life—is a needed intervention to the past, present and future miseducation of peoples of Color within the U.S. K-12 and post-secondary educational systems. By shifting the center away from White-dominated institutions of K-12 and higher education and toward grassroots, community-based critical teacher professional development (Kohli et al., 2015), the work of the collective reveals the necessity of counter-hegemonic forms of education that create pathways toward individual and collective self-determination for people of Color. It also raises critical questions about the need for creating accountable communities in order to address and prevent intimate and interpersonal gender and sexual violence within organizing communities (Chen et al., 2011).

Author

• Cecily Relucio-Hensler, University of Illinois at Chicago