I am very pleased to share with you this interview with Larry Ferlazzo of EdWeek on my latest anthology, Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth. Hope you find our efforts helpful. Thanks again, Larry, for giving us this exposure!
-Angela
By Larry Ferlazzo on March 27, 2017 1:50 PM
Angela Valenzuela agreed
to answer a few questions about the new book she has edited, Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice
Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth.
Angela Valenzuela is a
professor in both the Educational Policy and Planning Program Area within the
Department of Educational Administration and the Cultural Studies in Education
Program within the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University
of Texas at Austin where she also serves as the director of the Texas Center
for Education Policy and the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy
Project (NLERAP).Valenzuela is also the
author of Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics
of Caring and Leaving Children Behind: How "Texas-style"
Accountability Fails Latino Youth.
LF: You write that the
book came out of the Grown Your Own Teacher initiative. Can you tell us about
that effort and the book's origins?
Angela Valenzuela:
The anthology,
"Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum
for Educators of Latino/a Youth," examines the knowledge, skills, and
predispositions required for higher education institutions to effectively
educate the future educators of Latino/a children, children of color, and
language-minority youth, in general. "Growing Critically Conscious
Teachers" refers both to creating pathways into the teaching profession
via our organic partnership model, as well as fostering teachers' critical
consciousness. There is no need to outsource education to the corporate
sector or recruit educators from overseas.
Our vision instead is to
grow our own future educators from within our own communities, armed with the
knowledge, skills, and dispositions that no longer perpetuate what I term,
"subtractive schooling," while also strengthening local capacity.
Asset-based pedagogies instead become a new default with a humanizing,
social justice praxis that allows students to be transformative agents of
change in the world. That is, they must help students get out from under
the dominant group's imposition of its monolingual, monocultural, and
objectifying values, and ways of knowing and being that, drawing on Paulo
Freire, domesticate rather than liberate.
"Growing Critically
Conscious Teachers" reflects the history and work of the National Latino
Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP; pronounced "nel-rap"),
a national consortium and nonprofit. We are comprised of primary,
secondary, and post-secondary educators, leaders of community-based organizations,
as well as university and school district partners that work together to
address, in a context of teacher, parent, and community empowerment, the
teacher preparation and retention crises in our states and nation, as well as
the underrepresentation of Latino/a teachers (7.1% nationally). As one of
our NLERAP elders out of one of our sites in Dallas, Texas, Hector Flores,
wisely admonishes, "The teaching profession is the most important
profession of all because it is the key to all the other professions."
LF: What are two-or-three
specific examples from the book that teachers can apply practically to their
classroom tomorrow?
Angela Valenzuela:
Faculty using the text
have already shared with me that they find the exercises that interrogate
deficit thinking and White privilege useful.
Bafa Bafa is the name of
another fun but highly instructive activity on how we as individuals make assumptions
about members of other cultures that are frequently distorted. The
exercise involves dividing preferably a classroom of 20 students minimum into
two cultures, an Alpha and a Beta culture. They convene separately
perhaps in two different rooms and they develop their own respective cultures
with their own norms, values, and customs. They can even come up with their own
"foreign language," with made-up rules that govern its use.
Then there's a series of "visits" made by perhaps two or three students
from each culture visiting the other where they are supposed to experience a
kind of culture shock because while exposed to the other group's culture, they
are not taught it. This happens two additional times with fresh sets of
students visiting the other culture. Alpha and Beta groups then convene
separately to draw inferences from each others' cultures based on the visits
each paid to the other. Then the whole class comes together for a group
discussion. Students come to understand how stereotypes of other cultures get
formed and perpetuated. It's truly fascinating and worth incorporating as a
regular feature of the college curriculum. Most importantly, it helps everyone
to realize that they have a lens through which they view the world and how this
is consequential to assumptions that we make about members of other groups, and
thusly, relationships, that in turn impact policies and practices that impact
them.
Though time consuming, I
highly recommend university faculty to consider having their pre-service
teachers conduct an ethnography in a local community. This fosters a deep
sense of context that would be useful to any future educator, and professors
themselves. Participatory Action Research (PAR) prepares future educators
to administer PAR projects that in their future classrooms at any grade level,
transforms youth into researchers so that they can become more aware and
conscious about injustices, while preparing them for college careers that are
re-cast not solely as individual achievement, but as a perpetual process of
community empowerment and uplift.
LF: How would you say the
book's suggestions compare to the ideas of culturally sustaining pedagogy and/or culturally responsive teaching?
Angela Valenzuela:
"Growing Critically
Conscious Teachers" is premised on the notions of both culturally
sustaining pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching, but also goes beyond
these massively important constructs to offer an organic, community-anchored
framework through which this progressive kind of education can be
accomplished. It calls upon us as educators to forge common cause with
community-based organizations that are in turn partnered with school districts
and universities to develop pathways to the teaching profession. This is
a grassroots approach that helps us to sidestep the vacuous, objectifying,
competitive framework enshrined in ESSA--and formerly, NCLB and our state
accountability systems--that are jealously wedded to rating and ranking
children and schools and in so doing, dehumanizing and objectifying them.
In contrast, we advocate
for grassroots collaboration and partnerships--old-style democracy, as it
were. In this vein, we hope that the reader will take away a sense of the
infrastructural framework or architecture for the alternative that we advance,
as it reflects years of important thinking drawn from our collective
experiences in both the academy and our communities across the U.S. With
the help of earlier Ford and Kellogg funding, we continue to carry out this
work across our GYO sites in Sacramento, California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin;
Chicago, Illinois; Brooklyn, New York; Dallas, Texas; and Austin, Texas.
LF: What did you learn
from your work across these different sites nationally?
Angela Valenzuela:
In trying to get GYO
efforts off the ground throughout the country, what became abundantly clear for
us as an organization is that the investment needs to be in our CBOs where they
lead these initiatives. A CBO could be a civil rights organization, a
non-profit, or simply a group that forms and moves into action at the local
level. Among the reasons why we think CBOs need to anchor the GYO
educator agenda is that they have the greatest stake in whatever reform is
advanced when they're almost always an afterthought. Relatedly, our
approach contributes to sustainability over the long term. There is a lot of
mobility in our universities and school districts. You find your
champions and invest in them and before you know it, they're either gone or
"restructured," making for a poor foundation on which to pursue any
reform. Another important factor is that given the lack of teachers of
color in our K-12 system, our current bureaucratic model leaves them with having
to bear the burden of implicit bias and stereotypes that are often
debilitating.
It is totally unreasonable
for anyone of us to expect these teachers to excel in spaces of oppression
simply because, in our minds, we in higher education, NLERAP scholars included,
have prepared them well. In the meantime, teacher retention remains a
ubiquitous crisis--and we're not resolving this when we disregard educators'
work situation. Our teachers need support and here is where the community
comes in. It can partner with districts and universities to develop
authentic, place-based curricula, prepare teachers, and forge pathways into
higher education for students in ways that tap into, as scholar Tara Yosso
theorizes, the community's cultural wealth. In our own GYO site in
Austin, Texas, we, too, are finding that our partnership supports dual language
teachers that feel alienated in their own schools where speaking Spanish is not
particularly valued.
LF: The book discusses
"participatory action research projects." Can you give an example of
such an effort, how and why teachers would organize one, and describe how
similar or different it might be to what some educators know as teacher action research?
Angela Valenzuela:
PAR is quite different
from teacher action research. PAR assumes that people who are impacted by
a particular issue should be co-researchers from beginning to end. This is
opposite a more common situation where, for example, "member
checking" occurs for validity purposes but only after the investigation
occurred. Moreover, since students, as well as their families and
communities, have the biggest stake in the outcome of a particular problem it
tends to tap positively into students' own motivations to rectify injustices.
An example of PAR is from
a chapter authored by Julio Cammarota where students in a Tucson Unified School
District High School were punished for speaking Spanish in class, a widespread
problem that surfaced in dialogue. They conducted observations, generated field
notes, and they analyzed the data, identifying the relevant patterns or
"codes." Drawing on scholarship, as well as their own experiences and
observational data that they collected, the students developed codes like
"English submersion" and "Spanish disadvantage" for drawing
inferences on the labeling of youth as delinquent or deficient for speaking
Spanish in class.
The students then created
a role-playing skit that re-told a racist incident but which was illustrative
of the broader problem. After developing a script and strategy, they then
presented this work to parents, students, and community across various gatherings,
creating a reflective space where constructive dialogue could take place.
Community members were able to learn about their experiences while giving voice
to comparable experiences at the work place. All learned about language
rights and how their rights are systematically violated in their schools and
work places.
Through this process, the
students learned about Arizona's anti-bilingual law and discovered that it only
impacts teachers and not students. Even if Arizona public school teachers
are restricted from speaking languages other than English during instruction,
this does not apply to students. Just as importantly, the research
process contributed to community awareness and empowerment while helping
students to acquire research and presentation skills that help them to see
themselves as knowledgeable, enhancing their academic self concepts,
dispositions important in the college classroom.
LF: With the practical
struggles and challenges that many teachers face on a daily basis, it can
sometimes seem overwhelming to many when they hear that responding to social
justice issues needs to be on their agenda, too. How would you and your
chapter contributors respond to that concern?
Angela Valenzuela:
Not sure about my
colleagues, but I'll give this a stab. My sense is that if social justice
pedagogy of the kind that we advocate for in "Growing Critically Conscious
Teachers" were the default in higher education, this question would not
even get raised. So clearly, higher education needs to engage in soul
searching and transform itself in order to preempt this kind of question.
Another thought is that
since there are ways, big and small, to be social justice educators, it's
probably the big ways that are more overwhelming than the small ones.
Everyday life involves choices and decisions in the classroom and at school
that can and should involve a personal ethic of fairness, respect, and
equity. So being a social justice educator in itself doesn't quite strike
me as the rub. However, especially for Anglo educators--and some teachers of
color--relinquishing power would be. A critically conscious teacher can
no longer hide in the comfort zone that they only teach subjects as opposed to
students. Instead, they must re-tool to incorporate social justice
pedagogy, as well as interrogate the extent to which they themselves are
perpetrators of unjust policies and practices.
They sometimes don't even
see how policies like high-stakes testing and curricular tracking work to
systematically privilege majority group children and youth, while
under-privileging their minority counterparts. And then to realize that
these correlate to race, ethnicity, language, class, and gender can be an
overwhelming thing to seriously ponder. Entire educational histories and research
programs are dedicated to addressing these institutionalized, embedded
injustices. Though difficult and challenging, an effective, social
justice pedagogy provides no refuge in "individualism" or
"color-blindness" as a legitimate discourse or ideology. For all
social justice educators have to consider the role that white supremacy and its
logics, including Anglo-centric curricula, implicit bias, structured silences,
and institutionalized forms of discrimination, have historically worked to
stratify culturally diverse children for unequal futures.
That said, there has to be
plenty of scaffolding and professional development for educators for them to go
in this direction. It also helps enormously to have enlightened
leadership along these lines within a school or district that explicitly calls
for ending all institutionalized forms of oppression for this not to be an
insurmountable burden or responsibility for educators. Ideally, as we
suggest, this can get accomplished through strategic, meaningful partnerships
anchored in our community-based organizations. Ultimately, we can also
grow our own leadership and policy makers from the ranks of our GYO teachers,
too.
LF: Is there anything I
haven't asked you that you'd like to share?
Angela Valenzuela:
Yes. I'm in
policy. I have struggled for many years, particularly in the Texas State
Legislature, to eliminate not standardized tests, but high-stakes testing, and
met with some success that I'm very proud of. The reason that many of us
get into policy is because we see the big picture and realize that systemic
problems are oftentimes an artifact of inadequate or harmful policies that need
to get remedied or eliminated altogether. Another motivation is a
frustration that many have working in and with classrooms and schools where the
impact does not often feel or seem "systemic enough." That is, we
feel that while our contributions are positive, they are not widely felt across
systems that need to be transformed. This is a good reason for getting
into policy.
However after working for
well over 16 years in the legislature to kill bad bills and to get good ones to
get heard and passed into law, I have come to feel that the legislature is
frequently a weapon of mass distraction. Every single session, it gets us
all ramped up to oppose the most egregious legislation impacting our
communities and they suck the energy and oxygen out of the good efforts of our
civil rights groups and coalitions. Don't get me wrong. We must
continue to do this work, but none of those 16 years built a school, a
partnership, or a civil rights, social justice curriculum like we are now doing
in Austin, Texas. And I honestly think that it is a strategy of the right
to keep us on the left busy so that we don't "graduate" to taking on
their pet projects. Just as importantly, this work in the policy arena
has the effect of reinscribing what truly are oppressive policy discourses and
agendas.
I always tell my students
that those of us in policy should perpetually be haunted by Audre Lorde's
dictum, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's
house." We all teach--and our graduate students learn--the master's
tools and will continue to do so. What we must always be mindful of,
however, is that the current discourses valorize competition, individual merit
and achievement, false notions of entitlement, mental testing, and uninspiring
notions of reform like narrowing the "achievement gap," even when the
metrics themselves work against our children. In so doing, these
discourses structure out what our communities really want.
We want our children not
just to achieve, but to thrive. Nor do we want to be white. We seek
respect and full inclusion of our subjugated knowledges, histories, languages,
identities, and ways of knowing and being in the world that have served us well
on this continent for millennia. I hope that our work inspires others to
go deeper into their communities to form organic partnerships and grow the
critically conscious teachers that we desperately need if we are to get out
from under the yolk of objectifying and dehumanizing discourses that are
incapable of giving us the liberation that we seek both for ourselves as
educators and society as a whole. Thanks so much for this opportunity to
share.
LF: Thanks, Angela!
Larry Ferlazzo is an award-winning English and
Social Studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif.,
Larry Ferlazzo is the author of Helping Students Motivate Themselves:
Practical Answers To Classroom Challenges, The ESL/ELL Teacher's
Survival Guide, and Building Parent Engagement In Schools.He also
maintains the popular Websites of the Day blog. In this EdWeek blog, an
experiment in knowledge-gathering, he will address readers' questions on
classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing
teachers. Send your questions to lferlazzo@epe.org. And offer your own thoughts
and responses in the comments section.
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