Ethnic Studies Course Research Articles

California’s AB 101

In 2021, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 101, which requires that all students graduating high school by 2029–2030 must take an ethnic studies course. California is the only state in the nation with this graduation requirement. This article explores the historical and contemporary factors that pushed California to legislate and implement AB 101. We utilize a historical case study approach focusing on different student-led movements that embraced ethnic studies to combat educational inequalities. To do so, we pinpoint three historical phases in which ethnic studies became implemented throughout the state. In the first phase, influential scholars in the early and mid-twentieth century produced scholarship about historically marginalized people of color, which became foundational for the study of Black, Chicana/o, Asian American, and Indigenous people. The second phase involved students of color fighting for a culturally relevant curriculum, as demonstrated by the 1968 Third World Liberation Front, the 1968 East Los Angeles Chicano walkouts, El Plan de Santa Bárbara, and Chicanx/Latinx student hunger strikes in the 1990s. Lastly, the third phase consists of contemporary students, parents, educators, and activists successfully petitioning their local school districts to mandate ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement. Despite these gains, far-right organizations in cities like Santa Barbara have mobilized to push back against both the ethnic studies requirement and progressive social justice groups like Just Communities Central Coast. This resistance initially derailed AB 331, an earlier ethnic studies bill that Governor Newsom vetoed based on accusations that it was “anti-Semitic.” A revised version, AB 101, was then introduced and passed. While momentous, we contend, AB 101 is still limited; reaching its full potential would require greater teacher credentialing and the expansion of ethnic studies to K–8 students.

Racial Micro-Affirmations: Latinx Close Friendships and Ethnic Identity Development

Through analysis of semi-structured interviews of 30 Latinx college students, we examined how Latinx students experience belonging, acceptance, and affirmations at a Hispanic-Serving Research Institution (HSRI) in California. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of racial micro-affirmations, we uncovered two major themes: the importance of close friendships and the impact that ethnic studies courses have on ethnoracial identity development. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion of the on-campus experiences of underrepresented students as well as how to best serve and affirm them at HSRIs.

Implementing Ethnic Studies Courses to Fight the Spike in Anti-Asian Acts

Recent surveys suggest that the anti-Asian attacks that began during the COVID-19 pandemic may continue to occur. One of the ways school leaders can respond to this problem is by implementing ethnic studies courses. Unfortunately, organizers of social movements sometimes thwart efforts to increase ethnic studies courses, claiming that this type of curriculum is anti-White. But since well-taught ethnic studies courses are designed to benefit all students, this claim is based on misconceptions. In this paper, I clarify how ethnic studies courses benefit students from all ethnic and racial groups and why more of these courses need to be implemented to fight the recent rise in anti-Asian attacks.

“My People Wouldn’t Stand For This”: Ethnic Studies as Critical Civic Education

Using testimonio method and methodology, this paper provides the stories and narratives of three Chicanx teachers who developed and taught an Ethnic Studies course to Latinx students in a large urban high school. Long celebrated as a way to fill in missing history, art, literature, resistance, and knowledge of communities of color, this paper argues that Ethnic Studies is also a vehicle to grow and embolden student sense of critical civic literacy. Through the narratives that emerge from these three teachers, the curriculum and pedagogy offered by these teachers positively impacts and propels students to advocate for themselves and their communities through civic and political action. The purpose of this article is to highlight the curricular and pedagogical choices of three teachers teaching Ethnic Studies and how Ethnic Studies can be used as a tool to increase Critical Civic Literacy.

Eroding Community Cultural Wealth: How Schooling Devalues Latina/o/x Students’ Identity, Pride, and Language

Educational narratives written by several cohorts of Latina/o/x students in a college-level ethnic studies course, first-year retention program showed how the current hegemonic educational paradigm—with its attendant neo-liberal, colonial, white supremacist and Eurocentric logics—abates the accumulation and employment of community cultural wealth. Specifically, thesesystemic obstacles impact linguistic, navigational, and resistant capital as Latina/o/x students recount how learning English, feeling othered by classmates and teachers, and internalizing assimilationist and deficit-based ideologies to avoid harassment or mistreatment factored into their educational experiences. Situating community cultural wealth amid the Americanization, deculturalization, or assimilationist projects that have shaped the schooling conditions for students of color better accounts how educational practices, curriculum and spaces can destabilize the range of community cultural wealth competences Yosso has classified. This project adds complexity and highlights the fluidity in the community cultural wealth model by recognizing competing forces at work: the cultivation of these assets via family/community home spaces, discourses and networks, as well as the attrition of these competencies in formal educational spaces. As such, this study contributes to the existing research about CCW by underscoring a dimensionality not yet fully addressed, and, by recognizing the epistemological significance of these skill sets.

“Let the Atrocious Images Haunt Us”

The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of documentaries and films dealing with the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the Mexico-US border, some of which portray the migrant body. This article examines three films routinely included in ethnic studies courses, anthropology courses, and Latin American studies courses: Dan DeVivo and Joseph Mathew’s Crossing Arizona (2006), Rebecca Cammisa’s Which Way Home (2009), and Marc Silver’s Who Is Dayani Cristal? (2013). Of particular interest are the films’ rhetorical devices, imagery, and affective charge—how they politically engage viewers. Guided by extant scholarship on stereotypical depictions of the migrant body, the essay’s first part critiques Which Way Home as buttressed by necroclichés, defined here as rhetorical devices that situate migrants as condemned to slaughter. The essay’s second part activates diverse theoretical interventions to show how migrant lives—even when indelibly associated with images of broken bodies—become poignant to the viewer. Notably, with Which Way Home and Who Is Dayani Cristal?, the inclusion of religious motifs renders the migrant body “grievable.” By taking to heart the profound relationship that Latinx communities have traditionally maintained with Christianity’s redemptive message, this article interrogates whether entirely secular arguments can be elaborated to confront the Borderlands’ humanitarian catastrophe.

Race-reimaged self-determination theory: Elucidating how ethnic studies promotes student identity and learning outcomes using mixed-methods

Latinx students often experience a lifetime of deficit-based pedagogy. These deficit views are perpetuated in instruction that ignores the depth of their insight and intellect, essentially pushing them out of school. In contrast to assimilationist approaches to instruction that omit and disparage minoritized students through the formal and informal curriculum, ethnic studies is a pedagogical approach centered on affirming students’ identities and nurturing critical consciousness. Recent large scale empirical analyses across various contexts demonstrate important educational benefits of ethnic studies courses for students but have not included the examination of identity, the very mechanism that underlies the theorized effectiveness of ethnic studies. By applying a race-reimaged Self-Determination Theory using a qualitative-dominant sequential explanatory mixed methods design, we elucidate the ways ethnic studies informs learning via students’ motivation and identity. Quantitative findings confirm prior research on SDT, but the qualitative findings extend a race-reimaging of SDT. Students expressed the ways rigorous courses focused on developing an understanding of systems of oppression through critical dialogic engagement with teachers and peers (and materials) can promote critical curiosity, affirm relatedness that considers race/ethnicity explicitly, as well as competence and autonomy.

15 Getting Over Ourselves

15 Getting Over Ourselves Mimi Thi Nguyen (bio) I enrolled in my first ethnic studies course as an undergraduate in 1993, and it was, to put it mildly, disappointing. Punk had given me my first radical education in US empire, the police state, and the riot, and gender and women's studies my second radical education in postcolonial and women of color feminisms. But what I remember most about that first ethnic studies course was the professor telling crude jokes about balls (specifically the correspondences between the relative heft of sports balls and testicles) and holding court about his arrests some thirty years ago, and that halfway through the semester I began skipping both the lecture and discussion sections except for exams. For a young woman of color feminist who understood herself as an activist, and had also become interested in what theory could diagnose about the failures of movements, the course was a wash. Even at twenty years old, I knew something about the obstacles of radical self-aggrandization. Even as I write this now, a white lesbian "superstar" intellectual stands accused of abuses of power made possible by her entrenched position within a structure and an enterprise, and her supporters twist themselves to justify these abuses through appeals to the radicalism of their own intellectual labor.1 As a number of us have said to each other throughout this latest debacle, everything is terrible. Here, then, is where I want to begin: where radicalism (an uneasy referent, as any student of social movements—or a predatory professor—knows), race, and the institutions of knowledge elaborate each other as objects of profound investment for both political capital and capital accumulation. What can we make of the machinations that anoint the radical intellectual as foundation and arbiter of radical knowledge, which is both the premise of their claims to "outsider" [End Page 343] status to the institution, but also to those goods that the institution provides to some and not others, including healthcare, tenure, and a paycheck? And how do we as scholars of power, in both senses as critics and as agents, narrate the crises we purport to resolve? There are questions I learned to ask and begin to answer through the interdisciplines that are my intellectual genealogies, including gender and women's studies and ethnic studies; these same interdisciplines that are my institutional "homes" reproduced and even amplified some of these conditions. So here I rehearse two modest proposals. First, we must account for the material conditions that support—or not—our labor. Second, our scholarship need not (and sometimes cannot) be commensurate with an identifiable activist project or form of resistance to be "properly" political. To put it another way: How does the valorization of certain intellectual labors foreclose possibilities for future collectivities, and necessary accounts of power? I For those of us in or from interdisciplines such as ethnic studies and gender and women's studies, our institutional histories as fields of inquiry and administrative academic units are often related (though in no straightforward manner, despite the conventional story) as histories of student upheavals and popular demands. From these histories arises the fiction that produces "the people" as an object of knowledge that claims and hails the radical intellectual as their interlocutor, translator, arbiter, or representative otherwise within the institution. This relation between "the people," "the community," and the old-fashioned "masses," and the radical intellectual has long been the occasion for reflecting upon the affinities and fault lines between forms (and categories) of movement work. In a still-crucial essay—one I read as an undergraduate, and which likely informed my bad attitude in that ethnic studies course—Trinh T. Minh-ha troubles the theoretical formation of "the masses" and the author or artist as their avatar, writing, "One invokes them and pretends to write on their behalf when one wishes to give weight to one's undertaking or to justify it."2 Or as Nick Mitchell observes in his schematic history of the "(critical ethnic studies) intellectual," the presumptive inseparability of representation in knowledge and representative in politics valorizes the intellectual as a figure of fantastical investment, especially for the intellectual herself.3 Both...

Colorblind Attitudes, Empathy, and Shame: Preparing White Students for Anti-Racist Social Work Practice

ABSTRACT This study examined the relationships between racial knowledge and emotions as predictors of anti-racist behaviors. We analyzed responses of 135 White MSW students from a cross-sectional survey conducted in May 2018. Regression was used to analyze the relationships between colorblind attitudes, empathy, guilt, shame, and anti-racist behaviors. Results indicated that colorblind attitudes and White shame, after controlling for other factors, were correlated with fewer anti-racist behaviors; empathy and having taken an ethnic studies course were related to more anti-racist behaviors. These results provide evidence that racial emotions affect anti-racist behaviors, above and beyond what is accounted for by knowledge about racism. The results encourage educators preparing students for anti-racist practice to develop interventions that target racial emotions among White students.

Ethnic Studies Today: Battles and Possibilities

When California’s Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1460 into law on August 17, 2020, we cheered.1 As educators of color who teach in the California State University (CSU) system and as ethnic studies educators, we celebrated the fact that the discipline of ethnic studies was being recognized for the value it brings to all students’ lives. AB 1460 requires CSU students to take one 3-credit unit of any qualifying ethnic studies courses. Almost a year later on October 8, 2021, Governor Newsom signed Assembly Bill 101 making California the first state that requires students to take Ethnic Studies to earn a high school diploma. The approved AB 101 legislation requires that by 2025 all high school students take one semester course in Ethnic Studies. Despite these victories—mandated Ethnic Studies in the CSU and in California high schools—the battle continues as the implementation of Ethnic Studies remains contentious. Nonetheless, we are still hopeful in the transformative possibilities of Ethnic Studies in California.

Ethnic studies increases longer-run academic engagement and attainment

Increased interest in anti-racist education has motivated the rapidly growing but politically contentious adoption of ethnic studies (ES) courses in US public schools. A long-standing rationale for ES courses is that their emphasis on culturally relevant and critically engaged content (e.g., social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes, contemporary social movements) has potent effects on student engagement and outcomes. However, the quantitative evidence supporting this claim is limited. In this preregistered regression-discontinuity study, we examine the longer-run impact of a grade 9 ES course offered in the San Francisco Unified School District. Our key confirmatory finding is that assignment to this course significantly increased the probability of high school graduation among students near the grade 8 2.0 grade point average (GPA) threshold used for assigning students to the course. Our exploratory analyses also indicate that assignment increased measures of engagement throughout high school (e.g., attendance) as well as the probability of postsecondary matriculation.

Historias Americanas: Implementing Mexican American Studies in K-12 Social Studies Curriculum in the Rio Grande Valley


 
 
 This essay contributes to the growing literature on Mexican American Studies in K-12 within the broader field of Ethnic Studies. While most of the literature on the movement for Ethnic Studies within Texas and across the nation mainly focuses on the impact of Ethnic Studies courses on students’ academic success, this essay highlights a professional development program for K-12 social studies teachers in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas entitled Historias Americanas: Engaging History and Citizenship in the Rio Grande Valley, funded by a federal grant. This essay provides an overview of Historias Americanas, the objectives and structure of the program, and the ways in which the program contributes to the discourse on Mexican American Studies in K-12. It also describes the frameworks that form the crux of the professional development process: place-based education and culturally relevant pedagogical frameworks.
 
 

"Pride and prejudice" pathways to belonging: Implications for inclusive diversity practices within mainstream institutions.

Within mainstream institutions such as colleges and universities, scientists and social leaders, alike, are faced with persistent and new challenges to forging paths toward inclusion among marginalized group members (e.g., Latino/a/x and African Americans). Integrating theoretical perspectives that conceptualize identity among marginalized groups as tied to culture and strengths with literatures on threat and stigma, we propose a "pride and prejudice" approach to inclusion. We provide support for the efficacy of inclusion as 2 pathways-one route that is associated with recognizing "pride" or the history and culture of marginalized groups and another that is related to reducing "prejudice" or perceived discrimination toward marginalized groups. Specifically, we demonstrate using actual demands for inclusion generated by students attending 80 colleges and universities that a pride and prejudice approach is consistent with collective calls for institutional change voiced by marginalized group members and their allies (Study 1). Then, Study 2, using longitudinal data of Latino/a/x and African American students (N = 1,967) attending 27 colleges and universities we reveal the impact of pride (e.g., taking an ethnic studies course) and prejudice (e.g., perceived discrimination) experiences on sense of belonging, and in turn academic and health outcomes (e.g., graduation rates, depression). We provide evidence for 1 theory-based process whereby individual experiences tied to pride and prejudice can impact belongingness through intragroup and intergroup relations. Theory and policy implications for institutional inclusion efforts including the importance of fostering ties to ingroup and outgoup members are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Classroom counterspaces: centering Brown and Black students in doctoral education

ABSTRACT Campus counterspaces exist as spaces where Brown and Black students can promote their own learning, and where their experiences are considered valid and critical knowledge. However, research on classrooms as counterspaces has often been limited to ethnic studies courses. Using data collected from a graduate-level research methods course situated in the U.S, this study explores what constitutes a classroom counterspace, and how instructors can create classroom counterspaces. Data were mainly collected through student conversations, reflections, classroom observations, and field notes. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory, the study revealed that classroom counterspaces recognize the complexity of Brown and Black identity, push back against whiteness, and support Brown and Black students’ vulnerable and honest perspectives on the academy. These findings highlight areas where instructors can rethink their pedagogical approaches to create classroom counterspaces, and suggest that classroom counterspaces also push against the hegemony found in current U.S. higher education.

Writing Oneself Into the Curriculum: Photovoice Journaling in a Secondary Ethnic Studies Course

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students’ writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent’s participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student’s writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students’ histories are inextricably linked.

‘This is me’: Expressions of intersecting identity in an LGBTQ+ ethnic studies course

This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong course that combined a semester-long LGBTQ+ studies class with a semester-long ethnic studies class, taught by the same teacher and attended by the same cohort of 26 students. Through a combination of identity maps, student interviews, and a transfer task (i.e., a digital textbook project), we explored students’ experiences and efforts to discern how their awareness of LGBTQ+ and ethnic studies issues, particularly the intersectionality of those issues, may have influenced their own identities. This research offers a model for educators and policymakers, as well as lessons learned and inspiration, for incorporating intersectional LGBTQ+ content and curriculum into social studies classrooms. It presents ways, both big and small, for K-12 educators to connect LGBTQ+ issues and rights with those from communities of color. Findings illustrate that queer theory and historical thinking can indeed offer a valuable guide for encouraging social studies educators and students to expand their understanding of the intersecting experiences of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.

Critical teaching in classrooms of healing: Struggles and testimonios

Using testimonio methodology, this article describes the testimonio and struggle of two Chicanx activist social studies teachers teaching in a large urban high school serving socio-economically poor Latinx students. Both teach critically working to develop their students’ understanding of how their ethnic and community histories contrast with larger historical narratives. Both teach the racism, misogyny, and homophobia rampant in American history by connecting it to the present. They also engage a culturally sustaining pedagogy to give students strength from their cultural inheritance. Each approached this differently, one developing an ethnic studies course, and the second developing a circulo de hombres, and embedding a youth participation action research. Each teacher tackled critical teaching and healing simultaneously from different perspectives yielding a variety of accompanying struggles.

“We Have a Strong Way of Thinking … and It Shows through Our Words”: Exploring Mujerista Literacies with Chicana/Latina Youth in a Community Ethnic Studies Course

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Literacies of Refuge: “Pidiendo Posada” as Ritual of Justice

This article explores how a secondary ethnic studies course leveraged immigrant families’ literacies rooted in the Mexican spiritual ritual of Las Posadas for in-school literacy instruction and to engage in community-responsive grassroots processions as social protest. Using ethnographic and participatory design research, the authors—one a university researcher and the other an ethnic studies teacher—examine the literacy practices of a long-standing immigrant community–classroom partnership that unites day laborers, families, students, and teachers in the name of justice and refuge. Using photographs, interviews, students’ literacy artifacts, focus groups, and field notes, this study asks, (a) What do literacies look like in an ethnic studies course that designed learning around local community knowledge and sanctuary? (b) How do students respond to such curricular design? This study contributes ethnographic knowledge on school-based participatory research projects that build on the intergenerational literacies, sociopolitical awareness, and social movements of Latinx immigrant families.

“See, Click, Fix”: Civic Interrogation and Digital Tools in a Ninth-Grade Ethnic Studies Course

ABSTRACTDrawing from the theoretical contributions of Ethnic Studies, activist new media, and critical digital literacies, this article explores the nature of a ninth-grade curricular unit about how one’s daily environment impacts one’s health and well-being. Using a combination of ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods, the authors highlight an Ethnic Studies teacher’s innovative and community-based pedagogy that honed students’ critical digital literacies and civic action practices through their engagement with the digital media app “See, Click, Fix.” Findings detail students’ perspectives about how the unit both helped them resist deficit-oriented ideologies and served as a conduit for critical civic literacies. The authors contend that the fostering of critical digital literacies remain extremely imperative to the future and expansion of Ethnic Studies courses.