Towards Healing and Liberation: Co-conspiring with Children through Transformative Teaching Practices

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

Abstract

The final paper of the fifth grade student panel will frame the radicalized inequity in the U.S., particularly as it shapes elementary students’ experiences in schools, as a national crisis and call for a radical rethink of the responses from schools of education, as well as university professors, researchers, and academics in any field that calls itself concerned with conditions of wellness in the lives of children.

From students’ lived experiences, our teaching, and co-conducting research in communities and schools of color, we have witnessed a crisis facing urban youth involving state sanctioned, structural violence (Farmer, 2005) and socially reproduced dehumanization despite the brilliance, spirit, and talents they possess as enduring people. Intensifying their problems even more are schools with irrelevant classroom curricula and poorly trained, impersonal teachers. These urban schooling learning conditions are major contributors to a sense of academic marginalization that ultimately results in mass disappearance rates of students of color from schools throughout this country. These tensions and contradictions pose fundamental challenges to the shortcomings of holistic development for youth in urban schools. To be truly effective social justice teachers, we must channel students of color’s energy against the very social conditions that work to undermine their existence. This is why we must embrace organic, authentic, and context responsive teaching practices that sustainably foster student’s critical social consciousness, communities of liberatory learning, and highly engaged models of transformative teaching where multiply and historically marginalized youth of color learn to analyze and articulate the obstacles challenging them as they navigate their social conditions. For schools to be socially transformative (Hannegan-Martinez, et. al, 2022; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 1999) and radically healing (Ginwright, 2015) in the lives of urban youth, however, they must look more closely at their failure to connect the curriculum to the various needs of multiply and historically marginalized communities. This presentation calls for urban educators to adopt a critically engaging and liberatory (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Giroux, 2001) curriculum that pays closer attention to developing children as agents of community change while improving students health and well-being (Ginwright, 2018; Camangian and Cariaga, 2020; Simmons, 2021). By so doing, urban teachers can successfully construct pedagogies that draw from students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2020) to increase their critical social consciousness (Shor & Freire, 1987), develop critically caring relationships (Camangian, 2010; Howard, 2002; Valenzuela, 1999), and share counter-narratives (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) to address the additional developmental demands children in urban settings must negotiate.

Drawing from students' research as elementary students in Oakland, this paper examines the impact of transformative teaching practices and learning experiences that aimed at shifting student resistance against the social and ideological forces that undermine their existence. Using critical qualitative ethnographic analysis (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1998; Merriam, 1998), students will report on the development, implementation, and evaluation of an abolitionist pedagogy (Love, 2019) informed by anti-colonial theory (Fanon, 1963/1990), Freirean theory (Freire, 1970; Darder, 2002), and critical race pedagogy (Camangian & Stovall, 2022).

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco