Insights from Radical Ethnic Studies: Creating Educational Spaces in Support of Student Holistic Ways of Being

• In Event: Reimagining Pedagogy: Teacher Agency, Spiritual Inclusion, and Community-Centered Education

Abstract

Objective: In a chapter on Latinx Youth, a junior faculty and senior faculty build a metaphorical altar through Abolitionist and M(other)work ways of being in community with each other as a “radical break from state education systems” (Simpson 2014) through acts of care and vulnerability while accompanying students. Method: Through personal first-person reflections and dialogue, both individual and collective, we offer an analysis and reimaginings that discuss the process of relinquishing power, modeling vulnerability, and centering healing as our collaborative commitment to freedom dreaming. Findings: Through our partnership in learning from each other and with students through their contributions in class, individual check-ins, community dinners, and submissions, we found that they appreciated and learned deeply from four approaches that supported their holistic well-being: (1) Spirit: Healing Genealogies; (2) Body: Food as Sustenance and Land as Teacher; (3) Mind: Nurturing Wonder through Abolitionist Grading; (4) Heart: Confronting Death, Dying, and Loss, through reimagined forms of collective accountability. We illustrate how these approaches to learning became models for ways of being in the spaces we co-created that honor student values, histories, and imagined futures. Conclusion: Drawing from shared and emerging ways of co-creation with our students to better understand and confront the constraints and restrictions of academic conventions that reinforce carceral logics, we carve out ways of meeting and subverting the demands of our institutions by centering the integrity of our students’ well-being as radical acts of intentional care work.

Authors

• Christine Vega, San Jose State University

• Marcos Pizarro, California State University - Los Angeles