Radical Imagination Beyond the Limits of Educational Equity: A Grounds Up Look at Social Justice Reform in Schools

• In Event: Radical Imagination, Transformative Teaching Practices, and BIPOC Communities: Multiply Marginalized Children as Participatory Action Researchers

Abstract

The fifth grade student panel will open by framing prior research on educational equity as important but inadequate, imploring the field to push further and harder in areas of action research, critical literacy, culturally and community responsive education, and critical pedagogy as the logical response to the history of U.S. urban schooling (Ball, 2009; Camangian, 2010; Duncan-Andrade, 2022; Howard, 2013 & 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1994/2009; Tintiangco-Cubales & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). Throughout dispossessed communities across the country, students often resist and reject American schooling ideologies because its “official” curricula do not value the voices, sentiments, and backgrounds of urban youth of color. Instead, schools promote the interests of dominant cultures (Stovall, 2018). While students act against the various forms of social control in schools, they often resist in ways that lead them deeper into forms of domination and oppression (Solorzano & Delgado-Bernal, 2001). In these cases, academic disinvestment is even internalized, rationalized, and reproduced as the only viable form of agency to act against a schooling culture set against the validation of urban students (Kohl, 1994). Research suggests, however, that educational success for multiply and historically marginalized students of color might best be connected to transformative resistance (Akom, 2003; Author, 2008), rather than conformity, and that teaching practices that utilize the realities, ideologies, and attitudes of children and adolescents of color in urban schools can shift perceptions of cultural deficits in students, into potential cultural and academic strengths. If schools hope to become more culturally relevant, critical, and socially transformative in the lives of urban students, however, they must look more closely at their failure to connect the curriculum to the various needs of multiply and historically marginalized BIPOC communities.

This part of the discussion will include research-based examples of the curriculum, pedagogical strategies, and outcomes from this two-year project that employed critical ethnographic methods (Duncan-Andrade, 2006; Kincheloe & McLaren, 1998; Nader, 1972) and action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000) to add to the research literature on the essential elements of transformative teaching in schools serving historically marginalized communities. Fifth grade students are instructed through methods of critical pedagogy and Ethnic Studies to train them as critical ethnographic researchers in the development of a research lens for analyzing and improving the quality of education in their city.

Author

• Jazmine Fortes, Oakland Unified School District