The Making of a Radical Educator

• In Event: Latinx Experiences in U.S. Schools: Students, Teachers, Teacher Educators, and Education Allies as Collaborators

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
Although Latinx students account for a large portion of the population in the Los Angeles Unified School District, there are still students who don’t aspire to attend college because they are either unfamiliar with the process or have internalized negative stereotypes about their marginalized communities. As a scholar, activist, and secondary educator now serving in East LA, I have chosen to go into education as a means of serving my community and challenging negative stereotypes alongside other key stakeholders in my community (local politicians and community organizers).
Theoretical Framework
As an educator empowered by my community and its various organizational stakeholders, I pull from Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework to inspire my teaching. I situate myself as an emergent educator and community activist. I draw from my knowledge of the linguistic, social, and cultural capital my community possesses to better serve the students in my home town. I guide them, also by helping them understand the immense amount of wealth and knowledge that already exists in their very own communities, homes, and cultural backgrounds.
Methods and Data Sources
Autoethnography is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2010). By examining the journal entries I kept during my time as a student-teacher in my graduate studies and as a first-year teacher in East LA, I evaluate critical moments in which I used my platform as an educator to help make political change as well as the need to engage with other key stakeholders in the education of my students.
Results
The qualitative thematic analysis of the journal entries suggest that key experiences influenced how I engaged professionally with a number of key stakeholders in the education of my students. Themes across the entries illustrate that my intentional practices and strategies for teaching and learning reflected various forms of advocacy and activism. I fit the profile of what Flores (2017) calls a cultural guardian for my students in particular and community in general. I recorded many examples of advocating for my students, their families, and for myself. In the different spaces in which I moved each day, I advocated with the same underlying intention of making a more equitable and just world for those that I serve. The themes demonstrate that my year of student-teaching made me more politically engaged through teaching, and inspired me to be an educator that helps my students feel safe, empowered, and supported by both themselves and their peers in the classroom and beyond.
 
Significance
Often, the most radical changes communities see come from individuals from those very communities. It is vital to empower students from marginalized backgrounds and communities so that they can work together to make the change they want to see and to help students understand the beauty they possess.

Author

• Melody Esqueda, Los Angeles City Unified School District