Revisiting the Movement in Efforts to Build an Ethnic Studies Curriculum for Student Critical Consciousness in Coachella

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 5:10 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Consciousness and Political Efficacy: Impacts of Action Civics and Ethnic Studies on Youth Activism (Table 1)

Abstract

Objective
Coachella has a rich history of activism, built from the resilience of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the Chicano Movement (Paiz, 2022). This history has echoed through community efforts to transform schools across the eastern Coachella Valley. In 2022-2023, the Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) served 16,455 students (98% Latino students; 92.4% free-reduced lunch; 43.9% English-Language Learners), had a graduation rate of 78.8%, 10.5% lower than the state average graduation rate; and a college matriculation rate over 15% lower than the state average (CA Department of Education, 2023). These statistics have been used to create narratives of low-achievement and low-expectations in our community.
The Ethnic Studies program at CVUSD was created to re-engage students and to foster their critical consciousness so that they could push back against these narratives of low-achievement (Freire, 2000). This paper draws on testimonio from three teacher organizers who led the campaign for ethnic studies and its subsequent implementation in the CVUSD to highlight how a transformative curriculum can be instituted and the challenges that arise in this work.
Method
To tell this story, we employ Testimonio methodology, which captures the oral history of participants in a critical reflection of their personal experience within a particular sociopolitical reality, centering both the outcome of that experience and the process by which it was revealed to them (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). Testimonio has allowed us to learn from the experiences of movement elders and apply their understanding to our current efforts to construct transformative Ethnic Studies in our schools––and we apply it here for future generations.
Results
Our testimonios reveal how the UFW and Chicano Movements taught us the importance of engaging in community to create transformational change. As a collective of teachers, students, and community members, we organized informational meetings and garnered support from all stakeholders, leading our school board to pass a unanimous resolution making Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement. Together, we crafted a vision statement for CVUSD Ethnic Studies : “to engage our students in a critically rigorous academic discourse that challenges repressive hegemonic constructs, in order to examine their own standing in a highly globalized world so they can build collective power and transform our community to become critically conscious and reimagine a more just society;” and rooted it in four tenets: Self-Determination, Humanization, Community, and Justice. We based pedagogy and course development on the seven Ethnic Studies principles adopted from the original California Statewide Ethnic Studies curriculum prior to its revisions. To support teachers in implementing this curriculum, we organized professional development sessions where we brought in five Ethnic Studies professors to train close to 50 teachers.
Significance
Currently, CVUSD has 17 A-G approved courses by the University of California Office of the President. To conclude, our resilience and collaborative efforts with Ethnic Studies in the CVUSD have laid a strong transformational foundation to promote the academic success of the students we serve and offer a template for implementing transformative curricula across the country.

Authors

• Luis Pinedo, Coachella Valley Unified School District

• Johnny Gonzalez, Coachella Valley Unified School District

• Alfonso F. Taboada, Coachella Valley Unified School District