Ethnic Studies Pedagogical Horizons: Educators' Reflections on Desired Skills, Standpoints, and Content Knowledge of Incoming Students

• In Event: Freedom Dreaming Towards Ethnic Studies in Tumultuous Times: Teacher-and-Researcher Reflections on Race, Pedagogy, and Power

Abstract

Despite culture war debates about Ethnic Studies in the U.S. political imaginary, there’s an imminent need to refocus our attention on meaningful pathways to sharpen Ethnic Studies ecosystems of curriculum, pedagogy, and humanizing knowledge production. “Ethnic Studies Pedagogical Horizons” illuminates high school teachers' hopes for the skills, standpoints, and content knowledge they desire middle school students to have upon entering their Ethnic Studies class. Emerging research on Ethnic Studies has explored the subject’s capacity to build critical consciousness (Nojan, 2020), heal students' experiences with racial trauma (Nguyen and Borrero, 2025), and unpack the nuanced tensions in curriculum design and counternarratives (Kolluri and Edwards, 2022). This study seeks to join this chorus of research by asking the following research questions: 1) What modes of inquiry and knowledge production permeate Ethnic Studies high school classrooms in California?, and 2) How can we best prepare middle school students to enter high school Ethnic Studies classrooms? From this inquiry, I strive to clarify what foundational knowledge will best equip middle school students in their transition into the new epistemological and pedagogical horizons of Ethnic Studies in high school.

This paper methodologically engages critical qualitative research (Good and Diem, 2023) and critical race methodology (Solóranzo and Yosso, 2002) to explore how high school teachers are a) conceptualizing Ethnic Studies as a discipline in the classroom, b) approaching critical theories of learning associated with Ethnic Studies, and c) analyzing the structural barriers hindering the flourishing of Ethnic Studies. Intending to elevate the voices and counterstories of Ethnic Studies teachers to “shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for racial reform” in the field of education (Solóranzo and Yosso, 2002, p. 32), we interviewed current and former Ethnic Studies teachers (n=27). Participants were recruited through social media, personal networks, and partnerships with social justice teacher organizations in California; additional recommendations were solicited through snowball sampling from our participants. The interview protocol probed participants on content, pedagogy, and power, and undertook a methodological choice of providing “prompts, not questions” to elicit richer story-based narratives (Jiménez & Orozco, 2021). Interviews lasted between 55 and 75 minutes. Transcripts were cleaned over the course of three passes by the research team, and deductive and inductive coding were conducted using NVivo software.

Participants shared desires and advice for middle school teachers engaging with Ethnic Studies. Preliminary findings have gleaned powerful insights from Ethnic Studies educators highlight: 1) a diversity of definitions, aims, and of Ethnic Studies, 2) the necessity for a transdisciplinary pedagogical approach, and 3) a desire for students to gain experience with autoethography and reflexive thinking. I argue that we should view middle school, particularly social studies classrooms, as fertile grounds to build students' learning skills towards the rigor of Ethnic Studies. With teachers, district leaders, and teacher educators in mind, this work stands to illuminate pathways towards increased curricular and pedagogical syncopation between middle and high school educators as they freedom dream towards Ethnic Studies.

Author

• Darion A. Wallace, Stanford University