Browsing by Subject "ethnic studies"
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Item Accompaniment for the climb: Becoming reparational language educators of Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language(2017-12) Cushing-Leubner, Jenna‘Heritage’ language classes (e.g., native speaker or native language literacy classes) are often taught by already licensed world language teachers. Only a handful of U.S. teacher preparation programs offer explicit and extensive preparation for teaching ‘heritage’ languages (National Heritage Language Research Center, 2017). ‘Heritage’ language pedagogies (Fairclough & Beaudrie, 2014) and teacher preparation (Caballero, 2014; Potowski & Carreira, 2004) are underdeveloped and undertheorized. This dissertation considers what is possible when a teacher learns to teach Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language by attending to raciolinguistic ideologies and raced-language schooling policies/practices, generational knowledge of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, and lineages of collective struggle. This is informative for both the preparation/support of ‘heritage’-language specific teachers and for conceptualizing of critical and humanizing pedagogies that center the desires and possibilities of ‘heritage’ language learners. This dissertation emerges from the participatory design of one multiyear ‘heritage’ language program at a Midwestern city public high school that took shape around reparational aims for educational justice. It draws on five years of participatory research designs and the use of paired collective memory work. Participatory research connected multilingual and multiply racialized youth of Américas descent (self-named as Jóvenes con Derechos), their black multilingual non-Latina Spanish as a heritage language teacher (Toni), and a white multilingual non-Latina teacher educator (Jenna) as co-researchers and co-designers. Over five years, Jóvenes con Derechos youth, Toni, and Jenna engaged in multiple overlapping and interacting participatory action research and design projects that shaped the development of a reparational stance towards ‘heritage’ language education, curriculum, and pedagogical approaches. Youth-led participatory action research projects connected youth with existing movements for social change led by members of their own communities and in solidarity with other communities of color and Indigenous communities in their state and beyond. Using participatory design research components of historicity, instructional thinging, curricular infrastructuring, and role re-mediations, this study offers methodological and conceptual theorizing of participatory and humanizing research and pedagogies. I argue for the need of “methodological arts of the contact zone” and suggest as examples the framework of “interlapping participatory research projects” and collective memory work. This work also outlines an argument for conceptualizing ‘heritage’ language education as reparational in its desires and designs. The methodological framework of interlapping participatory research, accompanied with paired collective memory work, is then used to make visible the processes of becoming reparational language educators through a memory work montage of instructional thinging and necessary role re-mediations over time. Final implications consider what is required of teacher preparation institutions to engage in the formation of critical pedagogues who take a reparational stance to language education that understands multilingual youth of color as co-designers of their educational experience in schools.Item Divesting from School Resource Officers & Investing in Students - An Issue Brief(University of Minnesota - Curriculum & Instruction, 2020-06-08) Huynh, Denise H.; Golden, Sean C.; Kleese, Nicholas E.Following the death of George Floyd, this brief was originally authored and publicly released on June 8, 2020, by University of Minnesota Department of Curriculum & Instruction members, Denise Hanh Huynh, Sean Cameron Golden, and Nicholas Ezekuel Kleese. We outline a body of research that supports this decision, as well as offer practice and research-based actions that school districts can take to invest in students and communities. Specifically, we urge schools to divest from School Resource Officer contracts and reinvest those funds in 1) developing and teaching ethnic studies and heritage language curriculum, 2) expanding arts and creative out-of-school-time programming, 3) hiring and retaining critically conscious Black, Indigenous, and PoC school counselors, 4) hiring and retaining critically conscious Black, Indigenous, and PoC educators, and 5) applying trauma-sensitive, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive teaching practices. We share this brief as a way forward. We ask teachers and students to imagine better ways to educate—possibilities that cultivate equity, justice, freedom, safety, and peace, possibilities that recognize the ways in which our liberation is bound together.Item A Narrative Self-Study: The Intersection of Anti-Racism, Whiteness, and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in K-12 Education(2022-05) Siebert, MollyIn November 2020, the school board governing Patinmay Public Schools (PPS) passed a policy change requiring ethnic studies coursework to graduate. For several years, numerous people have worked to make ethnic studies a possibility for all students. My story with ethnic studies in PPS, however, began more recently in August 2020. Utilizing methods from narrative inquiry and self-study, I examined opportunities and challenges encountered during the early stages of implementing the new ethnic studies graduation requirement. Desiring to be a co-conspirator (Love, 2019), it was critical for me to reflect on ways in which my identity as a white woman impacted my work implementing ethnic studies as a graduation requirement. By conducting a self-study, I hoped to grow in my own practice, with the ultimate goal of improving ethnic studies programming for students and teachers in Patinmay Public Schools. For this self-study, narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) was utilized to explore, analyze, and make meaning of critical experiences from August 2020 to December 2021. By combining narrative inquiry with methods of self-study along with drawing on theories from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), I developed a framework to analyze and interpret experiences, interactions, decision-making, and programmatic dilemmas in various social contexts. Further, I aimed to contribute to previous research and literature that examines whiteness , white identity, and race consciousness along with research on ethnic studies in K-12 educational settings.Findings from this narrative self-study add to previous research and literature on ethnic studies, interest convergence, and white emotionality. By passing a policy in which students are required to take ethnic studies to graduate, PPS appeared to be equity and justice-oriented at a time in which the nation was undergoing a racial reckoning. There was public support for the passage of this policy and district leadership was applauded for this monumental change. However, some folx in leadership positions were resistant to disrupt or change existing systems, which supports existing literature on interest convergence (e.g., Bell, 1980; Milner, 2008). Stories related to professional development, determining licensure areas for teaching ethnic studies, infusing ethnic studies versus stand-alone courses, protecting previous informal affinity spaces, and co-creation in our current educational system may be beneficial to both the ethnic studies research community and K-12 school districts across the United States. The narrative accounts exploring experiences of white shame and discomfort adds to existing literature on white emotionality (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Love, 2019; Matias, 2016; Thandeka, 1999; Zembylas, 2018). Examining white emotions through the lens of anti-racism and belonging supports existing literature that as humans we fear abandonment and have a desire to belong (Lensmire, 2017; Thandeka, 1999). The findings illuminate that consciousness raising around white emotions is not enough. I argue that it is critical for white folx to also examine how emotions are being confronted and addressed—to take into consideration clean pain versus dirty pain (Menakem, 2017). Processing white emotionality through clean pain paves the way for healing. Through actions of transforming the self (brown, 2017), white folx become sites for disrupting whiteness and can better contribute to collective activism.