| Description |
Chican@ and Latin@ students have persistently had low high school graduation rates, as well as low college matriculation and completion rates. A wide range of literature suggests that ethnic studies-based educational approaches can positively engage students of color academically, in ways that markedly improve their academic achievement. However, the implications for implementing these types of rigorous, curricular models in elementary school settings for youth of color have yet to be fully explored. In filling this gap, this research project is an ethnographic, qualitative case study that utilized Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Education and Anzaldúa's Borderlands, in the design and implementation of an after school Chican@ centric course for fifth-grade Latin@ elementary youth. Drawing from the CRT literature on counterspaces, this research centered the process of co-developing a Chican@ studies counterspace (the after school course) with fifth-grade youth. Specifically, this research examined how the counterspace impacted the students' understanding of their own raced, classed, and sexed positionalities. Findings from this study illuminate the complex and multifaceted nature of developing counterspaces with Latin@ youth, and by extension young people of color. Specifically, the curriculum and pedagogy developed within and for the counterspace centered Chicana/Latina feminist ways of knowing. Both a Chican@ border/transformative pedagogy and a muxerista pedagogy allowed me to inform and frame my work within a Chicana/Latina feminist approach, one that encouraged a practice of bringing in our whole and multiple selves. Though many men of color have written about pedagogical practices with young people of color in their scholarship, they often do not centralize a feminista praxis in their pedagogy. Feminist pedagogical praxis allows one to center healing, the bodymindspirit, and contradiction as integral parts connected to the way that we learn and engage with one another. In particular, feminist of color frameworks center the body as a pedagogical tool. I argue that pedagogical frameworks that work to make sense of contradiction and center desire can lead to recognizing and understanding possibilities for healing and transformation, particularly within counterspaces. |
