Classroom to Community: Pedagogies That Advance Youth and Their Communities

• In Event: Decolonial Mapmaking: Critical Methodologies Contextualizing Disruption, Refusal, and Relationality

Abstract

Purpose: This paper explores community centric pedagogies that advance students and their communities in geographies vulnerable to economic injustice, housing instability, over-policing, and other oppressive forces. These realities often erase the assets of vulnerable communities (Moll et al., 1992; Yosso, 2005) and instead promotes White middle-class educational values (Brice-Heath, 1983; Diangelo, 2018). Schooling in vulnerable settings often situate youth in opposition to their home with the premise of a “standard of excellence” non-reflective of community standards (Kirkland, 2013). This paper examines a case of one high school’s pedagogical practices that support student agency in bridging curriculum with the surrounding community that promoted academic advancement, community development, and personal growth.

Theoretical Framework: Analysis is drawn through the emerging framework, Community Centric Pedagogy (CCP), that blends tenets from Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017)) and African Oriented Epistemologies (Karenga, 1998). CCP takes on this epistemology of community as the foundation in ways that center students and their communities, creates reciprocal partnerships between classroom and community that sustain transformative school-community relationships. This framework serves to build stronger communities and schools. CCP reframes democracy not as majority, but as a collective that serves the whole.
Methods: This ethnographic case study involves data collected over the duration of 10 months at Truth High School (THS) that include participant observations, site documents, and interviews with students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community organization leaders. A locally-developed protocol guided me in understanding the interactions of instruction, THS leadership, classroom culture, school-community relationships, and sustaining and transforming pedagogies. I analyze decolonial teaching and learning practices that identify if and how curriculum is culturally sustaining toward student cultures and identities, as well as toward their home and community life (Paris & Alim, 2017).
Results: Teachers utilized pedagogical practices that investigate the socio-political context of students’ communities and positionalities. Through a CCP lens, I observed how students thought deeply about class texts that interrogated concepts of gender, race, class, language, and other facets of identities in their writing and during class discussions. Further, curriculum sparked students to apply their education to their own lives by joining in community activism efforts such as Black Lives Matter events, creating food pantries for the school and surrounding community, and creating their own youth groups that advocated for community advancement. Students were more engaged in their classrooms when they could analyze their own communities, which led to community organizing outside of the school that also promoted their socio-emotional growth.

Significance: Centering community disrupted a colonial gaze of participants by focusing on collective advancement instead of Eurocentric notions of individualism. This study highlights how cultural and critical pedagogies lend agency to students to apply curriculum to their surroundings for collective advancement. Pedagogy that incorporated community sustaining practices uncovered the intersections of power and oppression that ultimately humanize vulnerable populations. Instead of pedagogy that separates school from the surrounding community, centering community allows the potential to engage students in their learning, provide healing, and support the advancement of the larger community against oppressive forces.

Author

• Hui-Ling S. Malone, Michigan State University