Elementary Educators as Agents of Change via Culturally Relevant Critical Pedagogy to Build Community for Student Success

• In Event: Reclaiming Social Justice Teaching, Curriculum, and Teacher Education: The Centrality of Grassroots Community Organizing

Abstract

With states using fourth grade test scores to estimate future prison construction, it is clear that the foundation for student educational success is laid in their formative elementary schooling. Yet, there is little research that focuses on culturally relevant critical curriculum and community organizing at the elementary level. With nearly 60% of Black and Brown students pushed out of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) high schools, there is a need for a successful elementary curriculum that fosters critical thought, while validating a child’s social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

This case study documents how a culture of possibility is established in urban classrooms by fostering authentic caring and community-building relations with students and their families. The study explores how teachers can become a part of the community through culturally relevant critical curriculum that respects students and welcomes the community into classroom spaces. By integrating themselves into the community outside the classroom, and by struggling alongside the community on the issues that affect it, such as immigration status and reform, drug abuse, or police violence, elementary educators become change agents, thus transforming their traditional roles and expand on the possibility of social justice teaching to include social justice activism.

This project brings critical pedagogy case studies in elementary education (Quintero, 2007) with contemporary theorizations of critical pedagogy as a politics of engagement (Martin, 2007), to include Culturally Relevant Teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995), as theoretical lenses for analyzing the development of a culture of possibility vis-à-vis community building and activism. Using Lave and Wenger’s (1999) rich concept communities of practice, this study analyzes the ways in which participants move from the periphery to the center across classroom and the spaces of community activism.

Using a case-study approach, several qualitative strategies were used, including observation, document analysis, and fieldnotes. Data were collected over the span of 30 months, from September 2007 to June 2009 and from January 2011 to June 2011. Data sources include video, observation of classroom teaching and student activism, student journals, and informal interviews with students, parents, teachers, administrators and community members.

The intersection of critical pedagogical strategies and community activism resulted in the overall academic and social success of the students. The growth in students was evident in verbal skills, independent research projects, and critical thinking, as well as through the conventional state measurements with nearly every student improving at least one level on the California Standards Test.

A shift in the participation of an increasing number of students lead to participating and organizing around pertinent issues in the community, such as the education budget cuts and immigration reform. With threats of budget cuts looming in 2008, our class organized a community forum, organized fundraisers, and participated in the A.R.E. statewide caravan to Sacramento, while their families also organized school May Day contingents and supported A.R.E. Undocumented Student Scholarship fundraising efforts. These spaces of social activism in turn expand on our knowledge cultivated in the classroom: social activism becomes a space for learning.

Author

• Carolina Valdez, University of California - Los Angeles