Ethnic Studies: A Vehicle for Revisiting the Past and Re-Imagining the Future

• In Event: Leveraging Cultural Historical Activity Theory in Higher Education to Re-Mediate the University

Abstract

Purpose
Colleges and universities implement ethnic studies as a requirement with the hopes it will foster cultural competency and improve campus climate, but ethnic studies is not without tensions and contradictions, particularly in the context of predominantly White institutions. This study aims to (1) identify tensions and contradictions in White students’ ethnic studies education and, in turn, (2) offer curricular and pedagogical strategies to “re-mediate” (Gutierrez, 2008), or reconfigure, ethnic studies towards the continued development of critical consciousness (Yancy, 2019).

Theoretical Framework
Guided by cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as a learning theory (Vygotksy, 1978; Engestrom, 1987), we posit ethnic studies tends to focus on two distinct object-oriented outcomes: (i) race education towards a “racial awakening” (Matias & Mackey, 2016) and/or (ii) knowledge building of race/ethnicity/culture as socially mediated and historically derived. In the former, courses tend to be organized around students’ collective memory, narratives based on one’s in-group (e.g., White wrongdoing of the past), whereas in the latter, courses are structured to allow students to deepen their collective remembering, an active process of exploring competing narratives of how different groups recount the past (Wertsch & Roediger, 2022).

We position memories as “powerful means for holding groups together” (Wertsch & Roediger, 2009), as shared scripts/schemas dictate in-groups and out-groups. We hypothesize ethnic studies courses that stop at collective memory often limit student learning due to the “ desire to feel emotionally satisfied with one’s own group and identity to it” (Wertsch & Roediger, 2022, p. 100), leading to White students’ resistance of ethnic studies curriculum. In contrast, collective remembering engages students in “a dynamic process that often involves active and contentious contestation rather than a static body of knowledge” (Wertsch & Roediger, 2022, p. 96). When collective remembering is enacted in ethnic studies classrooms, co-constructed narratives can emerge that re-orient group membership around shared goals directed towards the future rather than the categorically assigned groups of the past.

Methods & Data Sources
We conducted in-depth interviews with 17 White students and used flexible coding (Deterding & Waters, 2021) to analyze the data. Unlike inductive analytical approaches that progress from line-by-line coding to the identification of broader themes, flexible coding begins with indexing and categorizing the data followed by more in-depth analyses across multiple nodes and axes.

Results
We present two student narratives as illustrative cases: (1) Marcus and (2) John. Based on these two starkly different narratives, we offer the following recommendations to mitigate ethnic studies tensions: (i) center history and promote historicizing; (ii) encourage giving space and witnessing; (iii) cultivate a safe space for deconstructing and reconstructing Whiteness at the micro-level (personal) and the macro-level (systems); and (iv) balance pedagogies of discomfort and pedagogies of care.

Scholarly Significance
Our findings hold important implications for the need to develop curricular/pedagogical tools that facilitate proleptic historicizing (Bresco de la Luna, 2017; Gutierrez, 2018), tapping into ethnic studies as a transformative space that can transcend boundaries, cultures, and identities and as a vehicle for revisiting the past and re-imagining our collective social futures.

Authors

• Na Lor, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Aireale J. Rodgers, University of Wisconsin - Madison