Developing Literacies of Land in and through Ethnic Studies

• In Event: Addressing Issues in Environmental Justice Education through Collective Power in Chicagoland and Southern California

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
After years of organizing and movement-building, students, educators, and community members celebrated monumental policy wins requiring ethnic studies in California high schools. However, conservative forces seek to undo these recent wins and undermine the liberatory, transformative goals underpinning ethnic studies. Amidst pressure to water down or back away from liberatory ethnic studies, our objectives are to cultivate a space of learning, co-construction, and community with K-12 ethnic studies teachers while also sharpening and deepening our commitments to transformative research, grounding ourselves in models of nature-culture relations that center interdependency in Tovaangar - the greater Los Angeles region.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Drawing on perspectives from ethnic studies pedagogy (Sleeter & Zavala, 2020; Tintiango-Cubales et al., 2015) and nature-culture relations (Author & Colleague, 2015) our project (re)conceptualizes and advances the design of politically-conscious land-based learning environments. In the context of school gardens as sites of possibility for historically-responsive, justice-oriented, and transformational teaching, we engage community-based design (Colleagues & Author, 2016) as a process to support teachers (and ourselves) in building relationships and futures with land while also holding Indigenous people’s time and the political commitments that follow from this.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Co-design - a process that involves collaboration between researchers, teachers, and community members toward the development, implementation, evaluation, and refinement of educational artifacts - anchors our work (Kang & Nation, 2023). Our co-design collective includes learning scientists, ethnic studies scholars, urban farmers, and middle and high school teachers from diverse neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data sources include audio and video recordings and ethnographic fieldnotes from three field-based sessions taking place at a community-based urban farm and a sacred Tongva spring site in Los Angeles. Secondarily, we draw on transcripts of interviews with five participating teachers.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Recordings and fieldnotes from our co-design conversations surface the team’s understanding of the rich, complex, and occasionally fraught histories of land-based practices - in Los Angeles and beyond - that can serve as a wellspring for teaching and learning. These include the land-based traditions that im/migrant communities bring to our diverse city - such as the ‘Tres Hermanas’ garden or the milpa - as well as wonderings and questions about how to foreground and be in good relations with Tongva and Tataviam peoples and their land-based practices.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work.
Through collaborative partnerships, this work supports the movement for ethnic studies in science, history, health, and language arts classrooms in Los Angeles, as well as in community-based settings. Importantly, it also is a crucial intervention in ethnic studies by foregrounding the role of land-based relationships in a field where lands and waters are often backgrounded.

Authors

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles

• Nicole Barry, University of California - Los Angeles

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• Darlene Lee, University of California - Los Angeles