Everyday Resistance: YPAR as a Tool to Counter State Repression in an Ethnic Studies Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Work in Hard Times: Challenging Carcerality in Schools

Abstract

Like many school districts across the United States, Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) in California has been targeted by national anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) organizing in spite of the local community’s desire for such educational opportunities. Moreover, despite the often strong turn out of the community in support of Ethnic Studies, the current political climate (including rightwing organizing against all curriculum that teaches minoritized histories) has impacted educators’ day to day classroom decisions around the country, with many reporting that they are self-censoring and “restricting their teaching beyond the specific letter of the law” (Kelly, et al., 2022). Within this embattled context and push for standardized curriculum, this project considers SUHSD’s undertaking to embrace and develop a pedagogical and curricular framework that honors the educational legacy of Ethnic Studies based on local voice, histories, and communities (Cammarota, 2016; de los Ríos, et al., 2015). Central to Ethnic Studies praxis, this project expands upon making meaningful connections between classrooms (content, people, and practice) and communities (histories, civic action, and activism) while actively challenging curricular carcerality and repressive narratives. Our project forefronts student-community knowledges within curriculum development and pedagogical praxis, a central and meaningful intervention into this complex constellation of politics and curriculum mandates. For this presentation, we will explore how students conceptualize personal/community resistance to state repression through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) projects (Cammarota & Fine, 2008).

Drawing on critical ethnographic and participatory methodologies, we will focus on one Ethnic Studies classroom and the students’ critical engagement with dominant portrayals of resistance throughout their K-12 experiences as well as YPAR methods/decarceral pedagogies. We ask: how do students navigate, conceptualize, and express modes of resistance within a fascistic political climate? As our project centers curriculum local to the Salinas Valley, the specific carceral technology of ICE raids and fear mongering in and around the agricultural community, including schools, is central to local experiences of state repression. We find that YPAR practices offer tools through which students and teachers can navigate tensions inherent to bringing abolitionist education praxes into schools that are at once situated as institutions of the state and sites of possibility and resistance (Tuck & Yang, 2013; Wray‐Lake, et al., 2022; Hannegan-Martinez, et al., 2024). We draw upon Ethnic Studies and abolitionist genealogies in order to better understand how student and teacher praxes reflect these tensions and potentially support and/or undermine community-driven social justice movement efforts.

Authors

• Alo Wilson, California State University - Monterey Bay

• Chrissy Hernandez, California State University - Monterey Bay