Curriculum Dreaming and Building Toward Freer Schools (Poster 1)

• In Event: Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies: Research and Practice With and for Multilingual Youth

Abstract

In his book, “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,” historian Robin D.G. Kelley challenges us to consider that, “without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down…we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us” (2002, xii). His emphasis on creating “new visions” to guide our current praxis is at the heart of this work. Drawing from a narrative and an action research project with six Central American educators, along with Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies (Calderón, et.al, 2012) and LatCrit (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001), this work shares the process by which my co-creators and I used to imagine what we wish to build. A process, which we introduce as “curriculum dreaming and building,” helps us consider new educational possibilities and futures for emergent bilingual and multilingual youth (EBML) in our schools.

Curriculum dreaming is inspired by two powerful lines of scholarship and practices. The first of which is the work of Black radical tradition of freedom dreaming, such as Kelley or the late bell hooks who argued, “what we cannot imagine, cannot come into being” (2013, p. 53). The second is the indigenous practice of disruptive daydreaming (Dion, 2008), which has been likened to education whereby each “share a common project: the production of hopeful images. That is, the production of images that which is not yet…that provoke people to consider, and inform them in considering, what would have to be done for things to be otherwise” (p. 9, 2008). Curriculum dreaming, like freedom dreaming and disruptive daydreaming, is aspirational and it orients such dreaming to educational spaces in particular. It prompts us to dream of fuller, freer futures and is therefore, an emancipatory practice. It seeks to create liberatory spaces for Latinx youth that goes beyond current Latinx curricular representations which render them as cliched stereotypes, if they are included in the curriculum at all (Busey, 2017; Díaz & Deroo, 2020). Instead, curriculum dreaming dares us to think creatively and expansively about what we want our Latinx youth to see, feel and experience in their classrooms.

The question that guided our curriculum dreams was “What are the stories and knowledges that we want to make up our collective future?” We used this question as a starting point to build lesson plans that draw on the cultural wealth of our Latinx youth broadly, and Central American students and their families, in particular. The results from our curriculum dreams offer practical curricular and pedagogical suggestions for how to build loving and supportive classrooms for our Central American and other EBML youth. Such suggestions include using testimonios written by migrant youth themselves, teaching from a place of cultural wealth with culturally grounded rituals, and creating lessons in which our students learn from not only about our EBML youth and their communities. These examples, among others, provide a template for how curriculum dreaming opens the possibilities for freer tomorrows.

Author

• Yianella M. Blanco, University of California - Davis