Reclaiming the Archives of Lennox: Community Memory, Critical Pedagogy, and Educational Belonging

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Memory as Method in Education: Policy Histories, Community Pedagogies, and Liberatory Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This conceptual paper explores how community archiving and historical storytelling can cultivate educational belonging among high school students in Lennox, California—an unincorporated, predominantly Latinx neighborhood shaped by histories of resilience, marginalization, and civic neglect. Drawing from publicly available sources—local newspapers, yearbooks, court documents, and community-maintained platforms—this inquiry considers how such materials might animate a place-based curriculum grounded in critical interpretation and local wisdom. Rather than propose a finalized intervention, it reflects on the tensions and possibilities of engaging with community archives as dynamic cultural texts that offer both a critique of structural fragmentation and a foundation for imagining liberatory futures. The project asks: What might it mean for students to become stewards of their neighborhood’s memory? And how might this work inform educational research committed to spatial justice, community dignity, and historical consciousness?

Theoretical Framework
The analysis draws on three intersecting frameworks. Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth model repositions localized knowledge and social practices as educational resources. Critical Race Spatial Analysis (Solórzano & Vélez, 2015) offers tools for tracing how racialized geography structures educational dispossession. Gutiérrez’s work on sociocritical literacies and expansive learning environments reframes students as epistemic agents capable of constructing interpretive meaning from community texts. Together, these perspectives scaffold a curriculum vision attentive to structural context, responsive to local histories, and grounded in student voice.

Methodology & Data Sources
This paper uses constructivist, reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) to explore how publicly circulated and locally sustained materials inform community-rooted curriculum in Lennox, California. The corpus includes digitized yearbooks, newspaper clippings (early 20th century–present), court filings from Frye v. Centinela Valley Union High School District, and alumni digital platforms, approached as socially mediated narratives shaped by racial, spatial, and institutional dynamics. The analysis integrates design-based research on youth authorship and sociocritical inquiry (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and empirical evidence on culturally relevant pedagogy (Dee & Penner, 2017; Cabrera et al., 2014) to surface insights for justice-oriented curricular design grounded in memory and local histories.

Scholarly Significance
Community archives are increasingly recognized as sites of activism, memory-making, and cultural agency (Caswell et al., 2018; Poole, 2020), yet their explicit integration into curriculum design—particularly in spatially and racially marginalized communities—remains underexplored. This project addresses that gap by engaging archives as interpretive resources and employing "memory as method," allowing high school students to critically examine intersections of race, policy, and place within the Lennox community, historically shaped by civic neglect, displacement, and shifting demographics. While spatial justice education often emphasizes mapping and power analyses, this work highlights how community-generated archives foster historical consciousness, amplify marginalized voices, and nurture youth belonging. By recentering archival recovery as a method for educational critique and community-based inquiry, this paper contributes to an emerging intersection of memory, spatial justice, and curriculum thinking, illustrating how students can participate as stewards of their community's history and advocates for its future.

Author

• Edwin Leonidas Rivera Castellanos, University of California - Riverside