Pedagogy of the Suppressed: Culturally Relevant Education as Intervention

• In Event: 15.058 - Gangs, Schools, and Communities: How Marginalized Youth Navigate Complex Relationships

Abstract

Background: This paper focuses on gang-associated youth involved in a Gang and Violence Intervention Program (GVIP). Gang associated youth are less likely to engage and be welcomed to participate in traditional school activities. Utilizing critical pedagogy to describe, and also better understand the GC GVIP’s youth development. Freire (1970) stressed that education served as a transformative agent for the oppressed (marginalized) to better understand themselves the institutional processes they live under, as well as to begin their process of healing and to overcome adversity. The GVIP provided youth an opportunity to develop a critical insight to study and perform better in their school coursework, as well as to become more active, productive members of their communities.

Methods and findings:
The data presented in this study provides crucial insight into the value of cultural education for youth participants of the Gang and Violence Intervention Program (GVIP). This research study followed youth participants for five consecutive years as part of a larger research project. The data collected provides youth accounts of their experiences in- and outside of school. Qualitative methods were employed in this study, including field notes and observations of the youth participants. This paper focuses on interview data collected during the first year, the third year, and the fifth year of the study, as well as field observations, taken during the 5-year period. This study found that the youth benefitted immensely from exposure to the program. First, the youth’s perspectives and accounts, since joining the intervention program, indicated a stronger bond with the other youth participants within the same program, and by extension, their lived community, since they all resided within minutes of each other. This research also notes the importance that “culture” played to the youth’s engagement in the program.

Conclusion and implications: This paper highlights how the GVIP employs most of the aforementioned qualities associated with education as transformation. Gang youth are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to be on the path to incarceration. Results from this study can help K-12 educators understand the restorative values of critical pedagogy to re-engage gang-associated youth.

Author

• Mario Gerardo Galicia, University of California - Santa Barbara