Humility, Love, Precious and Beautiful Knowledge: Sacred Principles That Humanize Learning Spaces

• In Event: Precious Knowledge and Sacred Pedagogies: Centering Ethnic Studies Principles in Practice

Abstract

We find ourselves at a critical junction in the struggle for Ethnic Studies (ES). While California moves to make ES mandatory, we must pause to ensure that ES is understood in theory and practice. This paper draws from a larger study on effective teaching where an ES teacher, serves as the focal participant. Through an analysis of his teaching practices, I theorize how ES principles, can serve as epistemic anchors, to avoid the dilution of ES’s decolonial foundations.

I use postcolonial theory to situate Education in the U.S. as a postcolonial project. I draw from postcolonial scholars such Maldonado-Torres (2007) including critical pedagogues such as Freire (2000), Valenzuela (1999), and hooks (1994), to illustrate how schooling has produced dehumanizing relationships via a “banking model of education” and aesthetic teacher-student relationships. Finally, I turn to Meso-American indigenous epistemologies, such as the Nahui Ollin (Arce, 2016, Acosta, 2007), that informed the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona. Meso-American indigenous epistemologies, informed the analysis section of this paper, as the focal teacher in this study, incorporated these epistemologies in his practice.

This paper is part of a larger project investigating effective teaching of Latino/a youth in Hope Valley (pseudonym). Data came from a two-year study where 137 community college students were surveyed to identify effective teachers in Hope Valley (pseudonym). After aggregating results, 3 teachers from Hope High School were identified as effective teachers by these recently graduated high school students, becoming the subjects of this study. For this paper, I focus my analysis on the sole ES teacher of the group. Using ethnographic methods, over 27 hours of classroom observations were collected via field notes, audio/video recordings, and written memos. In year 2 of the study, teacher and student interviews, were conducted to triangulate data. Finally, given my positionality as a community-based researcher, detailed memos were conducted after each day of data collection, providing thick description of what was observed (Watson-Gegeo, 1992).

In this study, I examine how an effective ES teacher uses Meso-American epistemologies to humanize the learning space after the previous day, micro aggressions were experienced in the classroom. The findings from this study capture a moment that is often not captured on the research of effective teaching—a moment of reconciliation. Often research on effective teaching captures what is going well as prescribed by academic measures. However, this data captures how a particular teacher uses human measures such as humility, love, precious and beautiful knowledge, to humanize the learning space. Through the application of critical discourse analysis, this study illuminates the principles that this teacher holds as sacred, and offers our discussion with examples of how ES practitioners can embody decolonial pedagogies in praxis.

The findings from this study have the potential of shattering old conceptual binaries (e.g., Achievement gap), in order to imagine new forms of achievement. The application of Meso-American epistemologies serve as an example of what educators can accomplish when ES principles are practiced with fidelity.

Author

• Orlando Leonel Carreon, University of California - Davis