La Vida Es Un Regalo Sagrado
La Vida Es Un Regalo Sagrado: Expressions of Resistance, Resilience, and Re-imagination was written by the 2017-2018 9th grade classes of Ethnic Studies at Roosevelt High School and printed in January 2020
Introduction
We teach Ethnic Studies as a full year 9th grade course, where students engage in a curriculum that centers their voice, lived experiences, and realities. In this two semester course students collectively dig deep to learn about their roots, explore their identity, and build community to strengthen classroom relationships. Relationships are key, given that students will explore heavy topics, such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, classism, and colorism. The course also explores the history and culture of Boyle Heights, its families and the experiences of people of color in America. Students make sense of the present by looking into the past, from indigenous ways of knowing to the violence of colonialism and the consequences that followed for communities of color.
Ethnic Studies is talking back to the historical erasure in schools and reaffirming our presence and voice. The history of our community starts with us as educators and with our students, as we study our own voice and culture, a healing process begins. While we co-create and document these narratives and analyses, we are legitimizing and institutionalising in our own ways. We are part of a movement that responds to oppressive policies by interrupting the historical racist American school system. We are inserting ourselves into curriculum we have often been pushed out of.
As we create curriculum and plan lessons it is our intention to create space for students to talk about themselves. We invite students to be vulnerable and through that process they learn how to release the fear of sharing their experiences. Once one student goes to that place of honesty, then others have permission to share their emotions just as openly. They hear versions of their own family histories and experiences in the community and they feel less alone. As students shed embarrassment and shame and write with less fear, it also allows us as teachers to open up in new ways. Transformation requires growth and letting go, and we all face the process together, with vulnerability and empathy.
In class, we question and examine the many internalized dominant narratives to be cool, or smart, or good, or whatever else students are carrying with them. There is not one way of being, or existing, or loving, or healing. Telling their own stories allows more space and reason to let go of the dominant narrative. We’ve been in socialized environments and were taught narrow restrictions of the self and of the definition of history. Everyday stories of people that recognize the dignity of daily survival via hard work and the joy of thriving has little value. Our class interrupts the traditional way of instruction and learning that is so individual and we move into dialogue, sharing, listening, and engaging. We open space for the collective histories. We don’t teach facts. It is through these conversations that hearts are opened and the real teaching and learning start to happen: students see they don’t need permission to be themselves, they become human to each other, true education is listening and learning from each other.
As we move through the three focal points of the course–resistance, resilience, and reimagination–we acknowledge how trauma is often normalized. It is significant that we’re still standing after our experiences, no matter how ordinary or grand that experience is. Survival is acknowledged in these pages. Someone will read this and think, “I am not alone.” These pages are evidence that we exist.
Students might not know what resilience is until they hear Ethnic Studies pedagogy. In Boyle Heights we might not have financial capital, but we do have cultural capital that can help us succeed. The class gives them language for resilience and creates a space for what that can look like in their life, and most often, how they’ve already been practicing these strengths. It is a big moment to have other humans, adults and peers, listen to their story and then be recognized for their strength. This class, alongside the writing and publishing process, creates a container of time and space to give their testimonio. We ask them to explore the people who have been resilient before them, to trace the paths of achieving resilience and why it’s important. Moving beyond survival is possible. Resilience is in our blood.
We decide how to implement their stories and when we use student writing as a focal point of the curriculum, it legitimizes them as authors, scholars, and the creators of content. Because this is an annual publishing project, every new school year we use the stories of past student published authors from our Ethnic Studies classes as curriculum to help guide our current students through the topics and questions we are learning about and discussing. Out of all the texts we read, students are most enthralled with the stories of peers that were in their position a few years ago. There is validation that their stories will be read, heard, and seen. When students understand the experience of someone else they start connecting to it. It is powerful to see how students open up as they read more and more of the narratives and their expression becomes clearer with confidence. This is the catharsis that writing and reading allows when we humanize the curriculum. These pieces are a mix of celebrations and painful experiences and express full humanity. Acknowledging the good and the bad, then naming it, ultimately creates transformation. We understand that when you aren’t allowed to experience your full senses, it is dehumanizing. It is our intention to humanize pedagogy, so we can be our authentic selves and support students in that same process.
It is important for folks teaching Ethnic Studies to be attuned to the things students are going through. We as teachers authentically care about what they’re going through. We demonstrate our care for asking how they are feeling and adjusting to their needs. We listen closely and respond with compassion. We provide opportunities to engage intellectually using feelings-based curriculum.
We say things like, “I care about you. I love you.” It helps to hear those words from an adult who is not in their family. We normalize the care that can be exchanged in the classroom and we say it is okay to love and care about your classmates. It is okay to care about adults, too.
It is important for our students that we be humble with ourselves so that we are not seen as an all knowing powerful teacher that is going to get mad at them. This allows us as educators to be vulnerable. There’s so much we’re not going to cover and we have to remind ourselves that is okay. We let them know what we went through at their age and even share our current doubts about ourselves as people in history. It allows them to see how their own doubts about themselves are not real, but learned. It allows us to care for each other. We recognize we’re in a constant process of becoming. We as educators support each other, dive into the scary conversations and support ourselves through that process. Community unfolds through the exploration, even if it’s challenging. We step back, we listen, we take their energy, sometimes they are ready to share and sometimes they are guarded, but they guide the themes of our dialogue. As teachers we trust the work.
MAGDALENA CEJA, ROXANA DUEÑAS, JORGE LOPEZ, LILIANA MENDOZA
Ethnic Studies Teachers at Roosevelt High School, Boyle Heights, CA
