Curriculum as Diasporican Continuity: Pedagogical Commitments Toward Educational Futurity

• In Event: Curriculum, Memory, and the Puerto Rican Diaspora: Creating Futures Beyond Erasure

Abstract

This paper reflects on a Diasporican curriculum as a cultural and pedagogical form that fosters diasporic educational futurities. Grounded in Puerto Rican diasporic archives, the curriculum operates as the continuation of memory through its orientation to history, knowledge, and community. The paper considers how the curriculum was designed to affirm/sustain diasporican life and expression, foster interdisciplinary inquiry, challenge misconceptions, and engage archives as living sources that connect past struggles to diasporican continuities and possibilities.

Puerto Rican communities in the United States have long navigated histories of displacement, migration, and colonialism, shaping experiences of language, identity, and belonging. Scholars have shown how these histories have disrupted access to cultural memory (Flores, 2000; Santiago-Valles, 1995). In schools, such dynamics often appear through deficit frameworks that pathologize linguistic difference and economic struggle while overlooking resilience and historical complexity (Nieto, 2000; Irizarry, 2011). As a result, Puerto Rican histories are frequently marginalized, flattened, or omitted from curriculum.

In response, the curriculum activates diasporican community-based archives—including photographs, poetry, data, oral histories, and cultural texts—as central tools for learning. Rather than treating these as supplemental materials, the curriculum positions diasporican knowledge and memory as critical lenses for understanding history, place, and community.

In this sense, the curriculum enacts pedagogical commitments that shape how students encounter knowledge and themselves. These include diasporican affirmation, which centers diasporican presence and contribution as vital rather than marginal; archival memory, which cultivates critical archival literacies by teaching students to interpret, question, and analyze historical materials; interdisciplinary inquiry, which guides students to make meaning across genres and sources; challenging misconceptions, which critiques dominant narratives and myths about gender, race, language, and belonging; and relational learning, which invites students to examine their connections to history, culture, and community. These practices support students in reconnecting to erased histories, building critical thinking, and locating themselves within broader diasporic narratives.

The paper draws on culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017), critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), and decolonial thought (Wynter, 2003) to situate the curriculum within diasporican theory (Figueroa-Vásquez, 2020), where diaspora is a generative orientation that mobilizes memory and displacement as agency and imagination. The curriculum enacts this decolonial stance by affirming diasporican memories, expressions, and hybridity while challenging deficit narratives and positioning diasporic communities/epistemologies as central to education and the continuity of diasporican life and expression.

Drawing from Afrofuturism (Womack, 2013) and Indigenous futurisms (Dillon, 2012), the curriculum treats archives not as static records but as living sources for historical understanding and diasporic continuity. It becomes a site of educational futurity where students trace what has been erased and imagine what might yet emerge.

This paper’s contribution is philosophical and pedagogical: it frames curriculum as a living site of diasporican continuity and futurity—where the past, present, and future converge to support more expansive and just educational practices. It also contributes to diaspora studies, curriculum theory, and Puerto Rican/Latinx education by reframing diasporican knowledge as a lens for educational futurity.

Author

• Francisco Medina, John Jay College of Criminal Justice