Abby as Ally: An Argument for Culturally Disruptive Pedagogy

Storywork in Motion: Intersections of Identity

Having been raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western, Montana, as—what my relations have given me permission to understand my identity as—a FilipIndian, ⁴ I have had numerous opportunities to listen to the best of storytellers who modeled the intricacies of oral language, which I am forever trying to emulate and honor in my own writing. Knowing my own limitations as well as those of the written word, I proceed with the hopes that some of those qualities carry through and have impact.

Part of my identity also includes Whiteness; I was raised by a White mother who comes from a family of Montana railroad workers. As she’s read my scholarship through the years, we’ve had long conversations. In those conversations, she’s continued to learn and share stories with me. We’ve both practiced patience, love, and understanding through difficult talks as Whiteness continues to be revealed to her through my work. As I re-story Abby’s navigation in this article, I also hear echoes of the navigation my mother has made as she continues to show her love for me by forever listening and learning with me.

It is my hope, along with Abby, who has given me permission to share her story, ⁵ that parts and pieces of her experience help readers see that the impact of ethnic studies is not only beneficial for those whose ethnicities are finally centered in the curriculum, but also for those who are learning a more complete understanding of our nation’s history, possibly for the very first and only time in schooling spaces.

Abby’s experiences took place in the third year of my study (2012). Eighteen of the 29 total students in this class self-identified ⁶ as Native American from the following tribes: Navajo, Pima, Muscogee Creek, Hopi, Tohono O’odham. Five students self-identified as Hispanic, two as African American. Three students identified biracially; of those three, two listed Navajo/African American and one listed Pima/Hispanic. There was one Caucasian student, Abby.

Participant Retrospective Engagements

After the “study” had concluded, 17 participants and I remained in contact with one another through Facebook. Through this continued contact, I was curious to hear what stories, knowledges, and assignments they remembered from the class years earlier. During the summer of 2016, we engaged in a follow-up retrospective study where I returned to the Southwest U.S. city and invited all 17 (including Ms. Bee) prior participants to talk with me about what they remembered from their experiences in the Native American literature course. Interviews lasted between 1 and 2 hours. Of the 17 original participants, nine were able to schedule some time to talk with me, including Abby. In those interviews, I looked back at prior interviews, written works, and field notes, and I revoiced moments from the course that I thought were impactful for them at the time. ⁷ This parallels a method used by Rampton (2003) called participant retrospection, where recorded moments of interest were replayed and/or reread directly to students to better understand what they were thinking in that particular moment (Manning, 2016; Martinez, 2010). While interviewing Abby in the follow-up study, we shared our moments of impact. As such, Abby’s stories retold herein include both moments from 2012 (when she took Native American literature) as well as from 2016 (when she remembered and revisited that course through storied memories) using participant retrospection.

San Pedro et al. (2017) expand upon participant retrospection by stating that such methods must work to continue to sustain the relationships between participants and the researcher(s), exist in the context of the community, and be rooted in the emergence of our shared stories that become the central topics of inquiry. In this way, research moves from being “on” or “about” participants—often retold in the absence of them in Western research paradigms (Smith, 1999)—instead, it moves to being with participants, where the stories of both the researcher and participant are included (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017). By rooting the sharing and listening of stories in research (which is at the center of IRM), knowledge moves from being a commodity that some have and others don’t (Patel, 2015) toward a reframing of knowledge as the accumulation of information “in order to serve the needs of those with whom we are in relation” (Brayboy et al., 2012, p. 433).

Invitation to Join: Dialogic Selection

I received an invitation from Blasingame and Ortiz to take part in the class. Accepting this invitation, I began a 3-year study in which I worked with 16 students as focal participants from multitribal and multiracial identities (along with the classroom teacher, Ms. Bee, who self-identifies as Opata and Mayan, but separated from those Indigenous teachings at an early age) who were selected using a dialogic process. Paris (2010) discusses this dialogic selection process whereby “participants chose to work with me in addition to being chosen by me” (p. 140). This dialogic selection process was done over a period of 3 to 7 weeks. During that time, through continued interactions with students, curiosity was piqued and trust was established— students were curious in what I was doing in class if I wasn’t a teaching assistant or student teacher or administrator, ⁸ and I was curious in what they were saying, thinking, and learning. After some time where students began inviting me into their conversations, I reciprocated by inviting them to share more of their time with me through interviews and reading of their written works and other assignments.

In the first 2 years of this study, I worked solely with students who identified as Native American. Initially, my research focused on the ways Native American students were interacting with a curriculum that centered their stories, their heroes, and their literacies. As I was learning with them, I kept hearing peripheral conversations in both small- and whole-group in-class discussions and in the hallways that led me, in the third year, to amend the study to include voices from students who did not identify as Native American, such as Abby.

Between the lines of Abby’s continued story below—within her emotional navigation in her Native American literature class—is a cultural disruption at work. She reveals the hurt of seeing Whiteness, her resistance to lessons that center Indigenous knowledges, her grasping to maintain Whiteness, and her eventual transformation spurred by the love and friendship of those surrounding her in this class—her peers, her teacher, and me.

To honor Abby and her story of cultural disruption, I continue her navigation through this Native American literature course using a narrative style with the intent to impact emotionally. This is not to say that the sections directed at particular audiences are divorced; they are intricately linked, and I seek to make those links clear by using endnotes connecting the “vignettes” with the “scholarly” conversation between them.

Vignette #2: Day 2 (Early August 2012)

The day after students spent class time writing letters to Ms. Bee, Abby enters the class. I half sit, half stand, on a table near the entrance where students place their drinks, a rule Ms. Bee enforced (No drinks at your desks). Above me, loose wiring connects to nothing. My placement gives me the opportunity to say hello to all the students who are arriving. Abby is among the first to arrive. She returns my “Hello,” while nodding her head and proceeds to sit in her desk.

Ms. Bee starts class saying, “I appreciate your honesty and your candidness in these letters. Many of you, I would say more than about 65% of the class, said that you had not heard your culture represented in English classes or even in history classes. You guys wrote that …” she pauses to quickly shuffle through the letters, picks one out of the bunch, and reads directly from it, “‘It makes me feel like the education system doesn’t feel like we’re important.’” Looking up from the paper, she continues: “That really hurts my heart, so again, I want you guys to feel validated, to feel that your culture, your stories, they matter in here. Everyone’s stories matter in here. By a show of hands, how many of you have heard about your culture?”

The majority of the class’s hands go up. Abby’s does not. ⁹ She continues her question adding, “How many have heard about your culture in school?”

All their hands drop except one whose hand wavers between up and down.

“We are the Desert View Warriors …” Ms. Bee begins, but in hearing multiple students chuckle, she asks, “What’s funny?”

Keene (Hopi/Navajo) says, “That mascot may not offend some people, but it’s a stereotype to me.” ¹⁰

“What about the mascot at sporting games?” Ms. Bee asks in reference to a student mascot, usually White, who has paint on their face and wears some sort of regalia intending to represent a Native American.

Laughter erupts.

“Is that an accurate representation of who warriors are?” she asks, which is received by a chorus of “No.”

“That’s just some White gymnast dressed in—whatever that is—and doing backflips,” Neena (Pima) says.

Ms. Bee says to the rest of the class who has not reacted one way or another: “If you don’t know why they are laughing, you will see.”

She continues her questioning: “Are Native Americans just in museums?”

“We’re fossils!” Damon (Hopi/Navajo) says laughing.

“Do we think this?” Ms. Bee asks.

“Some people do,” Keene says.

“Native Americans are alive and well and are our future,” Ms. Bee says. “Why don’t we teach Native American literature?”

No one answers. After a short pause, she asks again, “Why don’t we teach Native American literature?”

“Native American peoples were here originally; we should learn about our stories,” Keene says.

“If we are teaching about Native Americans, should we also be teaching about African Americans?”

Many in the class reply in chorus, “Yes.”

“Mexican Americans?”

“Yes”

“You aren’t learning about your brothers and sisters,” Ms. Bee says. “Why not? You have such amazing stories to tell. How many of you have been taught about Native American issues today?”

No one raises their hand.

“You are not ignorant; you just haven’t had the opportunity to be taught. We will teach each other. I am doing way more learning than I am teaching this course,” she says. “We all have stories, and we will all be telling our stories. What’s most important is getting your story out in whatever form you choose: poetry, song, rap, five-paragraph essay, whatever.”

The lesson continues. Abby sits quietly. Her eyes move from Ms. Bee to those who offered answers to her questions. It appears as though she’s following the conversation, but without talking with her, knowing her, developing a relationship with her based on continued trust and mutual respect, there’s no way for me to know and no reason for her to share with me. Her silence continues for the better part of 3 weeks. ¹¹

Two weeks later, between class periods, Abby sees me in the hallway and says, “Hey Tim.”

I return a friendly “Hello,” and match her smile.

I ask: “How are things going in the Native American literature class?”

“It gets frustrating,” she says. “I don’t want to speak up a lot.”

She’s rushing to her next class, so I say that I’d love to hear more about her experiences sometime.

“Yeah? Sure. Okay,” she says.

Vignette #3: “I Wanna Support My Race No Matter What” (November 2012)

Three months into the semester, Abby talks with me about the class. She says she finds herself in compromising positions where she is confronted with Indigenous histories shedding light on the painful interactions the U.S. government and military had with Native American peoples.

She says, “Well, I wanna support my race no matter what and see some good in it. Then, when I watch a video in here, I feel bad for the Native Americans. I just don’t know if I should really side, or if I should be neutral.”

She is being exposed to new stories of our nation’s collective history, ones that have not been acknowledge in her prior courses, such as her junior-level required American history course. ¹² Exposure to a new perspective of history has resulted in her having to ask new questions, and the emergency of new thoughts ¹³ that make her feel as though she is going against her race, despite her wanting to “support (her) race no matter what.”

Her ideas and identity are becoming visible upon the backdrop of a fuller, truer picture of our nation’s history. However, when Abby walks outside this classroom, her positions, knowledges, and perspectives are, for the most part, once again validated in courses that adhere to standardized curricula that are celebratory of our nation’s past. ¹⁴

She says, “Sometimes I’m sitting there for 10 minutes wondering if I should say what’s on my mind or not.”

“Oh, really,” I ask. “What’s happening in those 10 minutes? What are you feeling? What’s going on in your head?”

“I’m just thinking of other people’s reactions and who’s gonna try to start an argument over it and seeing if I just want to start it up again or just stay quiet.”

Abby is becoming very reflective in this classroom, calculating other’s reactions, playing them out in her head before speaking. In doing so, the context surrounding her has created a silencing experience in which her thoughts are not voiced for fear of reactions from students around her. However, she’s actively doing something about those feelings: She’s resisting the content in online spaces and has a lot of support in her resistance.

She says, “Well, if I can’t share it here, I’ll go home and most of the time just rant about it with people on the Internet … in Texas, California, Canada, … Oklahoma, and Kansas…. They’re just listening.”

I ask, “Does that help?”

She says, “As long as someone’s listening, I’m good.”

Abby reveals that she is using digital communication to build her ideas against the teachings in the classroom. She is arming herself against lessons taught. She is enlisting strangers in online spaces to help her make sense of her feelings, to combat these Indigenous knowledges taught to her. She is not sitting idly by allowing such ideas to take hold in her mind. ¹⁵

Ethnic Studies and Whiteness Defined: Challenging “Safe Spaces”

To make sense of the tensions in her story, I continue by mapping the conceptual understandings around two key terms—ethnic studies and Whiteness—while providing an example of the ways the socialization of Whiteness led to the banning of a successful ethnic studies program. I rely on Sleeter’s (2011) definition of ethnic studies in her executive summary to the National Education Association, which states:

Ethnic studies include units of study, courses, or programs that are centered on the knowledge and perspectives of an ethnic or racial group, reflecting narratives and points of view rooted in that group’s lived experiences and intellectual scholarship. Ethnic studies arose as a counter to traditional mainstream curriculum [emphasis added]. (p. vii)

de los Ríos, López and Morrell (2015) add a critical element to this definition, stating that ethnic studies “begins with the assumption that race and racism have been and will continue to be strong social and cultural forces in American society” (p. 86). Ethnic studies works against the assumptions that schools operate in a race-neutral setting where curricula are objective and bias free. Instead, such courses make visible the ways formal schooling works to maintain cultural and societal order (Apple, 1990; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017; Wells, 2014). My own work documents the ways the Native American literature ethnic studies course provided sacred schooling spaces (Garcia & Shirley, 2013) where Native American students felt a greater sense of motivation, engagement, and agency particularly when coupled with culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies (San Pedro, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016).

Ethnic studies include sociocultural and sociohistorical knowledges that are systematically excluded and silenced from mainstream curricula. According to de los Ríos et al. (2015), ethnic studies has three primary functions. It:

All three functions intend to amplify voices and agency for students whose knowledges have been absent from school curricula. Although not central to its primary functions, I argue that an organizing, underlying ethic and structure of ethnic studies is that it also aids in the deconstruction of invisibility, socialization, and privileging of Whiteness that works to maintain social and cultural order. ¹⁶

As such, teaching ethnic studies involves the responsibility of making Whiteness visible, which is not an easy ask—not for those teaching it, not for those who have long been conscious of it and impacted by it, and not for those who are coming to see Whiteness for the very first time (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). In discussing this type of work, bell hooks (2003) says:

Working with white students on unlearning racism, one of the principles we strive to embody is the value of risk, honoring the fact that we may learn and grow in circumstances where we do not feel safe, that the presence of conflict is not necessarily negative but rather its meaning is determined by how we cope with that conflict. (p. 64)

In other words, feelings of safety and comfort often continue to center and be defined by dominant norms, ideas, and beliefs (Patel, 2015). Furthering hooks’s understanding of growth in spaces that may not feel safe, I use the term sacred truth space (San Pedro, 2017) to move beyond the goal of creating “safe spaces.”

Vignette #4: Years Later, Looking Back (July 2016)

Years after graduating from high school, Abby took a red-eye flight from California to return to the city we first met. The 100-plus degree summer weather is not necessarily the best time to visit this Southwest U.S. city, but she came anyway. She took a cab directly from the airport to meet with me and discuss what we remember from the course. I give her a big hug, tell her how great it is to see her, thank her for flying in to meet with me and with the other students.

She reciprocates my excitement, saying she’s happy to do it and thrilled to catch up and hear how other students from class are doing.

We proceed to a university classroom and sit on couches that are at a 90-degree angle, our heads slightly turned toward each other. ²⁰ After taking quite a bit of time catching up, hearing about our families, our change of occupations and locations, we start sifting through our memories of our time in Native American literature together.

As I hit the red audio and video record buttons, I ask: “So thinking back to the semester, just generally, what do you remember learning in the course?”

“I remember learning a lot of sad things that happened to the Native Americans, all the massacres,” she says losing eye contact with me. “But, I remember talking a lot about unity and understanding what’s happened and how we can fix it in the future.”

Our eyes connect again. I offer a small smile and say, “That’s what you’re left with years later?”

“Yes, and now more than ever we need to fix the future.”

“Yeah? Why do you say ‘now more than ever’? I think I have a good understanding with current events that are happening, but …”

“I can look on my Facebook timeline and it’s 50-50: Half of them are saying ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and the other half are saying ‘All Lives Matter,’ and they’re just not listening to each other at all, because you hear them, they’re saying this isn’t about race, this is just people, and other people are talking about the actual facts,” she explains emphasizing the words actual facts. “And it is true that African Americans are far more targeted than anybody else here, but I guess the population of White people is so much higher, that people are just kind of stuck in their own bubble and don’t understand that it still exists.”

“So you said earlier that now more than ever, the Native American literature class is really important,” I begin to ask as my eyes look to the ceiling to ponder the next question. “So, thinking to the future, what happened in that course that helped you see that it was impactful and important?”

“I think we … we got the truth out, and we went so far over it. We learned everything about how our country was founded, and we kind of heard how other people felt about it, and, I don’t know, Ms. Bee, she just, she has something about her where she can get you to say anything that you feel. Ms. Bee for president!”

For Abby, this course helped her to see a more accurate portrayal of our nation’s history. It helped her to frame other current issues that are popping up on her Facebook page, while seeing the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. This is quite a juxtaposition from the first vignette where she wrote about the tensions of being the only White student in the course.

Vignette #5: Listening Closely, Carefully, Compassionately (July 2016)

The shadows cast by the sun have shifted in the room. What’s felt like a 5-minute conversation has turned into a 65-minute one. Further into our conversation, reminiscing about the course and how it impacted Abby, she says: “The course, I was just … I was trying to absorb everything and, you know, get it all right and understand what was actually happening, ’cause the media is so suffocated that you never actually get to hear the real story. And, like I said, in there we were getting the brute, honest truth, and we were actually hearing what happened.”

“Was that the first time in high school that you sort of got that perspective?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“And what were you thinking as you went through and learned that there was this whole other perspective out there?”

She looks to the table between us, then to me and says, “It was kind of mixed. It was—I was scared sometimes and . . . I was kind of hurt and I was shocked at what they did back then. I was … I can’t understand why anybody would do that.”

“If you were scared and hurt and shocked, what made you stay?”

“Ms. Bee,” she says immediately. “I mean, I have a picture of Ms. Bee in my wallet still. She’s absolutely the biggest impact in my life, ever.”

“Wow. So, why do you carry her picture around?”

“She saved me. She helped me understand who I was. She helped me get past problems that I thought were gonna stick with me forever.”

“So she was, um, it sounds as though she was more than . . . just a teacher then?”

“Mm-hmm. She was—I don’t wanna say mother, but she was. That’s what she was. She took care of all of us. She never turned anybody away. It was just a classroom where you could even come in when there wasn’t school going on. If she was there, she let you come in. If you wanted to talk, she didn’t care, she sat down and talked with you. She cared about us and that’s not common in education anymore.”

“How did she show that she cared? What did she do?”

“She remembered all of our stories, you know. And she actually looked through everything we wrote, and she wrote comments and she said how she felt about things, and she just showed that she cared. She . . . actually proved that she was listening to us.”

Whiteness and Ethnic Studies

When schooling programs successfully implement curricula that counter the standardization of Whiteness by centering cultural and historical place-based teachings, they have been deemed dangerous and even shut down. No clearer recent example of such blatant maintenance of White supremacy has been seen than in the legislative dismantling of the Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program in Arizona (Cabrera et al., 2014). The MAS program focused on curriculum and pedagogy based on sociocultural experiences of students and the surrounding community. Quantitative results showed that “demographically similar” students enrolled in the MAS program had higher grades on Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) test, had higher graduation rates, and higher rates of college attendance than those who did not enroll in this program (Cabrera, Milem, & Marx, 2012, p. 2). As such, even though dominant definitions of schooling success—high test scores, graduation rates, college enrollment—were achieved, those in legislative power ignored the results and focused, instead, on the ways they thought this program was dangerous to the social fabric of the United States (despite many of them never setting foot inside an MAS classroom). They saw it as divisive and shut it down through the passing of the Ethnic Studies Ban (Arizona House Bill 2281, 2010).

When reading the language of the bill, it is easy to see the ways those who created and supported this bill viewed schooling as a means to maintain cultural order. The bill states, in direct response to the MAS Program, that any “school district or charter school in this state shall not include in its program of instruction and courses or class that include any of the following:

In this instance, knowledge that did not continue to maintain Whiteness was deemed unsafe by legislators. ²¹ And while there was no evidence that the MAS program did any of the bulleted items listed in this bill, Arizona lawmakers passed it. Dotts (2015) explains the thinking behind this bill, stating:

[Those] … involved in the ban against ethnic studies fail to see themselves as an ethnic group. Their ethnic and cultural identities have rarely, if ever, been questioned by the dominant culture and its institutions, including public schools and public school curricula. (p. 36)

As such, I argue that it is crucial to disrupt cultural norms leading to ideologies of Whiteness in order to change the underlying paradigms that lead to racist legislation preventing students from realizing their full potential in schools. Such disruptions require pedagogical practices that make visible what has been made systemically invisible (Whiteness) in order to see the humanity in one another.

Vignette #6: First Reflection Essay (August 2012)

A month into the semester, Ms. Bee has asked students to talk with one another, to get to know each other, to think through topics that they might not agree upon. She scaffolds these conversations by first having them take detailed notes of the documentary, book, or article, then moving to small groups to work through their emerging thoughts. During this time, she moves about the room taking notes to what she is hearing. After they have had ample time to hear from each other and voice their thoughts in small groups, she moves the conversation to a whole-class discussion. There, she asks questions based on their small-group conversations, sometimes even calling upon students who voiced a position. Even as they discuss in large group, she is still taking note of what she hears. Sometimes she furthers the conversation with questions of her own or asks students if they have thought about a certain topic a different way. When the conversation is robust—students are building off of each others’ ideas or offering different perspectives—she takes a backseat, still listening, still taking notes. At the end of the conversation, she informs them that they will be taking their first reflection essay test tomorrow. She instructs them to bring all the notes they’ve taken thus far in the course and to think through the many conversations they’ve had in class.

The next day comes. As students settle into their desks, she hands out the questions for the reflection essays. To their surprise, the essay questions are nearly identical to the ones they discussed yesterday. Ms. Bee created the test based on their questions, points, positions, and quotes that they had discussed in class up to that point in the semester.

For the rest of class, students write to the prompts. With 5 minutes of class time left, a handful of students are still writing. Abby is one of them. Ms. Bee says they can come in during lunch to finish. Abby comes back to finish all she has to say.

While grading/reading the papers, Ms. Bee underlines particular phrases of students’ essays. Often, she’ll write in the margin back to the students and adds emoticons like smiley faces or frowny faces or just simple affirmation words like “Yes!” or “Love this!” At times, she’ll push back on their thinking with forwarding questions for them to consider in relation to their own writing/thinking. It’s as if she is engaged in a conversation with students when she leaves these comments and emoticons, showing them that she’s listening, that she cares, that what they have to say is important, while also pushing them when she feels they need it. These pedagogical decisions are not just by chance. In discussions with me, Ms. Bee has stated that the act of supporting students’ thoughts with where they are at in a particular time in their lives is important. It’s important because when she provides nudges and challenges of thought later on, they will be receptive.

To replicate the conversation happening on paper, I insert Ms. Bee’s comments and her underlining of thoughts into the writing that Abby completed:

A nudge, a push to include a different perspective.

Here, Ms. Bee is validating that a disruption to prior understandings is occurring. She’s acknowledging that this moment of tension, of grappling, of confusion is crucial and necessary for new knowledges to take hold (or be rejected). Ms. Bee is watering the seedling of a thought, making sure the soil is kept fertile for future growth to occur.

Ms. Bee validates Abby’s emotions while also leaving room to alter this position. In leaving comments in the margins, she is showing Abby that she’s listening closely and intently while sometimes providing more context for Abby to understand her emotions in relations to others in class. Abby says to me in a later interview that because of these reflective essays she’s been asked to write, it’s opened up further conversations between her and Ms. Bee outside of scheduled class time.

“I’ve talked to her outside of class and … she’s completely open,” Abby says and then laughs through her saying, “She’s really open.”

“How does that impact you?” I say.

“It makes me trust her more. It feels like I can tell her everything … I’m not going to hide [my thoughts] from her,” Abby says.

Ms. Bee also reflected on Abby’s navigation saying, “I think she needed to find her voice first on paper and hear me validate that and then I think that kind of gave her some courage to speak to what she was feeling.”

Disrupting the “Slash” between Oppressed/Oppressor

The vignette above shows the important pedagogical shift in understanding culture not as set in stone, locked in the past, but as something in a forever process of being and becoming. The prompting essay questions were co-constructed with students based on how they interacted with the themes and lessons. And in the process of reading/listening closely to students’ emergent thoughts, Ms. Bee provides encouragement to continue to trouble through existing tensions. This pedagogical shift had an impact upon Abby. When ethnic studies courses center the knowledges, stories, and histories of a particular group, they also decenter societal, curricular, and pedagogical norms taught in schools. It made systems of Whiteness visible to Abby as she continued to make sense of what this meant for her own identity and knowledge.

In ethnic studies courses such as this one, it is nearly impossible not to make systems of Whiteness visible. And, while perhaps the direct goal of ethnic studies is not to center Whiteness (and I am not arguing that it should be), minoritized and Indigenous groups in the United States have been impacted by the maintenance of Whiteness. Our histories include painful interactions with racist and oppressive systems that operate from paradigms of Whiteness, which need encouraging spaces for disruption.

The 2016 presidential election revealed what many communities of color have long known in the United States: We are not a postracial society; we are not beyond our painful past as much as we try to hide it in painful saying like those on the walls of Desert View High School: “We are not responsible for the past, but we are responsible for the future.” I have thought about it this way: we (minoritized and Indigenous peoples) are continuing to have to fight for seats at the table, and, even when a few of us earn a seat at the table, ²³ we realize that the food is intentionally inedible to us. It was not hard to see that the crowds that turned up to the 45^th president’s rallies were overwhelmingly White. And, as I saw those crowds, I thought back to Abby’s transformation in the Native American literature class; I thought of Paulo Freire’s (1970) words:

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. …Only power that springs from … the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both [emphasis added]. (p. 26)

And while I don’t subscribe to this binary of good/bad, oppressed/oppressor that Freire theorizes within a Brazilian context, I do feel power in this statement. The power, to me, comes when reframing it to include the intersectionality of oppression. According to intersectional theory or intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), we each carry with us certain privileges and disprivileges, and we are constantly living at the intersections of them. For some of us, racist policies have led to social structures that hypervisualize and make real our disprivilege. For others, those same policies are hyperblinded—made invisible—to us the ways we have been privileged by particular identity markers. Allen (2004) states:

Readers tend to overlook Freire’s deep and crucial discussion concerning the oppressor, opting instead to focus only on what the text says about the oppressed. This is probably due to the fact that people have a much easier time thinking of themselves as the oppressed rather than the oppressor. (p. 123)

In stripping the binary held in the slash between oppressed/oppressor and relying on the intersections of our oppressions, I reread Freire’s statement above to mean that if we are to be “restorers of the humanity of both” oppressors and oppressed, we must pause to turn inward to reflect on the overlapping ways we can oppress and have been oppressed in order to realize our own potential to liberate. This requires a reflexive gaze inward or what Patel (2015) refers to as a pause: “Pausing … can be a productive interruption to … competitive ways of being, doing, and knowing, and they also hold potential learning within them” (p. 357–358). Such pauses allow for interruptions or disruptions of once-held beliefs that deny and silence the humanity and worth of others.

In connecting these three lines of thought—deconstruction of Freire’s binary, reflecting upon the growing pains of our nation, and Abby’s experiences in an ethnic studies course—I see the importance of ethnic studies rooted in CSP (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017), not just for those whose knowledges have long been ignored in schooling systems, but also for those who have been intentionally taught to ignore the ways monocultural and monolingual norms are maintained. Such obstructions to knowledge, I argue, hurt everyone including students who benefit from the socialization of Whiteness when Whiteness is maintained through mainstream schooling.

Vignette #7: Second Reflection Essay (November 2012)

Students are not as surprised when they receive prompting questions for the second essay test. Again, their ideas, conversations, and questions are the basis for the test. Abby is eager to share her truths on this day knowing that Ms. Bee will read her words closely and carefully, underlining ideas that are powerful to her, giving back to Abby’s in-process understandings.

Culturally Disruptive Pedagogy: Self-in-Relation

In 2012, Django Paris called upon educators, researchers, and communities to consider whether pedagogy that is responsive and relevant to culture goes far enough to dismantle Eurocentric paradigms. He called upon researchers and teachers to take a closer examination of what culturally relevant and responsive pedagogical practices do when moving from theory to practice in schools. A shortcoming of these pedagogical practices, he argued, is that they do not challenge dominant definitions of “success,” which continue to reify hegemonic ideals. Paris asks if the teaching and research founded upon pedagogy that is responsive and relevant to communities marginalized by systemic inequalities “go far enough … to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society” (2012, p. 93). This shift from making culture relevant (or responding to culture) toward pedagogies that work to sustain cultures, requires a reconceptualizing of culture itself.

To do this work, he offered culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP) as an extension to CRP. Ladson-Billings (2014), in supporting and forwarding Paris’ move toward CSP, says, “In many courses on multicultural education, students learn about static images of cultural histories, customs, and traditional ways of being. However, in reality, culture is always changing” (p. 75). Rather than discussions of culture and language as a noun, as something that once was (thus locking it in the past), this move toward CSP requires us to think of culture as a verb, something that is forever in process and in construction (something always within the present based on our histories and imagined futurities). Such a move, then, requires teachers and researchers to move beyond tired notions of culture as a noun, which tend to lead to questions such as: How can I use culturally compatible practices to trick students into learning content that continues to maintain social norms? The move toward viewing culture as a verb, something moving, changing, and always in process, leads to questions like: In what ways are youth enacting their cultures? How are youth cultures interacting, intersecting, hybridizing, and merging? How might the environments youth enter into impact the ways they enact their cultures? (San Pedro, 2014, 2015a, 2015b).

Kovach’s (2010) understanding of “self-in-relation” helps to answer some of these evolving questions. Kovach states that “knowledge is co-created within the … relational dynamic between self, others, and nature” (2010, p. 42). In other words, our ever-emerging identities and cultures must include a more complete understanding of the ways we operate within systems and how those systems impact us. Our selves, our cultures, are constantly in-relation to that which surrounds us, whether or not we are aware of how such systems operate (San Pedro, 2014). Ethnic studies, when coupled with CSP, can encourage students to become more fully aware of the way systems work and how they interact with and are part of those systems.

CSP asks that we center the ways our identities, cultures, and languages, are in process: fluid and impacted by systems. This move requires that teachers, researchers, and community members situate the ways we all operate within a society that is based on continued settler colonialism (Grande, 2004; Patel, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2014). It requires that we make visible and known the ways we are oppressed and oppressive, in order to change our circumstances. It requires deep reflexivity to see the ways our lenses have been made cloudy by contempt and pity with such deficit theorizing that underlie terms such as achievement gaps, grit, dropout rates, and school-to-community bridges. It requires wiping those lenses clear so as to see the richness of youth cultures, languages, and literacies that are in movement right before our renewed eyes. However, on this last point, Paris and Alim (2014) ask:

What if, indeed, the goal of teaching and learning with youth of color was not ultimately to see how closely students could perform White middle-class norms but to explore, honor, extend, and, at times, problematize their heritage and community languages? [emphasis added] (p. 86)

I emphasize this last phrase from their “loving critique” of CSP because part of their critique was that “CSP must work with students to critique regressive practices (e.g., homophobia, misogyny, racism) and raise critical consciousness” (p. 92). Paris and Alim acknowledge that even within counterhegemonic forms of youth literacies, there is a danger that current youth cultural practices also might lead to actions that reproduce hegemonic norms that oppress others in their own communities: “our pedagogical stance should also help youth, teachers, and researchers expose those practices that must be revised in the project of cultural justice” (p. 64). As such, part of the sustaining work is to see, understand, and realize the ways our in-process cultures impact and are impacted by others. In this process, we may realize that certain cultural paradigms and norms may still operate from hegemonic and settler colonial ideals that need disrupting.

By removing the slash between oppressed/oppressor, perhaps we can begin to see that in the processes of sustaining our cultures, there may be crucial disruptions that must occur in order to see the full humanity of another. For some, this move may be slight since our oppression has been ever present and at the forefront of our consciousness and everyday lives. For others, like Abby, this move may be drastic since systems of oppression have been normalized, hidden, and silenced through schooling, family, and societal norms.

Just as Paris (2012) built with Ladson-Billings’ (2014) CRP, and McCarty and Lee (2014) added the term culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies to forward CSP to be more congruent with Indigenous communities, I offer culturally disrupting pedagogies (CDP) in the same vein—to build toward solidarity and hope. CDP creates ruptures in schooling and social systems that counter the normalizing of Whiteness. I liken this disruption to the metaphor of muscle growth. In order for muscles to grow stronger, they must undergo small ruptures and tears in the fibers in order for new tissue to form as it heals. CDP creates such ruptures (zones of contact) for new knowledge and new identities to take hold. For educators, community members, and researchers, a crucial element of CDP is how we interpret disruptions and growing pains (i.e., muscle growth) that students experience, particularly when they have been denied access to a fuller history of our nation. Teaching youth to better understand themselves in relation to larger systems means that we encourage discussion, thoughts, and ideas that are in process and in transition. It means that we offer encouragement, love, and support to continue to remain in schooling spaces that may eventually challenge and change one’s ideas. It means that we create sacred truth spaces where multiple truths can be voiced, shared, and understood, which may lead to moments where students begin to consider new perspectives offered by their peers. It means that we listen closely and carefully to students’ emergent identities—particularly as Whiteness becomes more and more visible—and forward their questions, comments, and moments of tension as legitimate sources of knowledge. Rather than forcing them to memorize and regurgitate unchallenged “correct” answers on tests, we ought to be providing opportunities for them to voice their new identities and thoughts as they make sense of new paradigms that include others’ realities. It also means that we create meaningful “pauses” where students have moments to consider the many positions they’ve been exposed to in order to consider a deeper question: What truths do I want to hold as my own and what pieces of my prior cultural understandings must I disrupt and let go to make room for this new reality?

In this disruption, hegemonic and settler colonial logics are made visible, and in this visibility, such logics are under consideration of being changed. CDP relies on what Kinloch and I have theorized as Projects in Humanization through Storying, which value the co-construction of knowledge through dialogic listening and speaking that reveal the complexities of our shared humanity that are in relation to others’ lived realities (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014; San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017). A crucial part of Projects in Humanization is that it does not seek to other and oppress people; rather, it seeks to “value stories, dialogic listening, and self determination” (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017, p. 3). When we begin to see the ways our lives and cultures are in relation, overlapping, and intersecting with others—and built upon the maintenance and sustenance of relationships—we may begin to see the ways our oppressions overlap and are intricately linked. And if we are able to see the humanity in another—a friend, a colleague, an adversary, a community member—we may be more willing to disrupt that which is in us that has led to oppressive and dehumanizing relationships. We may be more willing to listen, to learn with another how we can disrupt social norms in order to grow to become someone better.

Vignette #8: The Ripple Effect (July 2016)

In remembering the class with me, Abby thinks through the many lessons she learned in the Native American literature classroom. The events taught that she specifically recalls are the Sand Creek Massacre, the wrongful imprisonment of Leonard Peltier, the battle of Wounded Knee and the subsequent forced migration to Canada.

“Do you remember the navigation that you went through about learning these truths for the first time? And was there ever . . . did you feel yourself changing at all?”

“I became more aware,” she says as I utter a mm-hmm connecting with her thoughts.

“Cause before I kind of just pushed away all the bad news and tried to hide it, and . . . I don’t know. Once you’re kind of forced to accept it, it just changes your mind. Once you learn some tragedy or something big that happened in life, it creates a ripple effect. And it’s gonna affect your brain and it’s gonna affect the way you think and that’s what it did for me. I guess I became,” she pauses trying to find the right phrase, “more of an open book through the lessons, to everybody. And I guess it was hard to accept some scary things like, I keep saying scary because it’s stomach turning, what happened. And you kind of go home and you think about it and you’re trying to break it down or you’re reading through the packets that she handed you and then when you come in, maybe the next day or two days later and you start writing all of it out; I think that’s when I really started understanding how I thought about it.”

Ethnic Studies for All

Abby was the only White student in this course. She knew that she did not have to stay. In this way, even in spaces that seek “inclusion” and “diversity,” Whiteness continues to operate by moving such courses to the periphery of the high school curriculum. If schools are fortunate enough to have ethnic studies courses, they often operate from the margins—an elective during the final year of high school, an option, a choice. Many students who come from marginalized and Indigenous communities don’t have such a choice when faced with course requirements. Their required courses offer lessons and teachings that often do not reflect their knowledges, their heroes, their stories. They are force-fed the official doctrine, the master narrative, the authoritative word, and if they make the brave decision to deny those teachings, to stand up for what they believe in, they may be pushed out of schools. In such instances, the blame is placed upon the individual as well as shortcomings from their families and communities: What is going wrong at home and in their community that they don’t see the purpose and worth of schooling? Instead, questions ought to be turned toward curriculum and pedagogy: What is going on in classrooms that deny students’ identities, that silence and story past their cultures? What might be going on in classrooms that leads to their resistance, to their refusal to learn “facts” that are not true to them? If ethnic studies were a requirement, students would have greater spaces in schools to teach their truths to others and to listen and learn with the truths of their peers. Teachers, too, would have access to curricula that frees them from the confines of standardized curricula. It would require that both teachers and students have a chance to face our nation’s painful past, to see how we operate within settler colonial states in order to counter that which is within and around us to seek solutions to our intersecting problems.

Vignette #9: (December 2012)

For their final reflection essay, Ms. Bee asks them to consider their growth over the semester, the main ideas they’ve learned, the identities they’ve shed and the new ones they’ve begun to wear. Abby writes passionately:

“We have been lied to through everything previous. … You can’t believe everything you hear, because everyone has their own way of telling the story. … We only truly saw what was in our view. You can look at things in only one way, and not even notice the real truth about what was there. But that’s not our fault, because that’s how previous teachers taught us. We were taught to only look at the good side from what we did to others, not the bad.”

Ethnic Studies, Compassion, and Writing to Understand

Ethnic studies ought to cultivate spaces that help students practice discourse of critique and possibility that affirm multiple truths and give access to multiple histories while deconstructing force-fed standardized truths. Schooling, then, ought to turn their gaze from learning outcomes toward learning coming in from the diverse experiences and realities of our pluralistic society. In this turn, writing becomes less about form and function and more about the discovery of oneself in relation to others through the crafting and sharing of stories, ones that are vulnerable, ones that are reflexive and considerate of multiple truths, ones that have opportunities to be heard and reciprocated so as to nourish and impact. This shift also asks of educators to make the daring and brave move to push beyond assessment—how well students reproduce what’s been taught—and into realms of construction: how well students form new identities, new knowledges, that take into consideration the lives, knowledges, and perspectives of others. This means that schooling structures resist and deny culture-blind modes while, at the same time, recognizing complex interdependent relationships occurring in our pluralistic society. As Abby’s story has shown, this must be done with compassion, care, and love. Such love can be felt through showing that we are listening closely and carefully to tensions voiced and written in the emerging identities of students. If we are to ask them to consider how their identities are in relation to larger systems, we also need to listen, offer advice, affirm their feelings, and push back and challenge when we feel they are ready. We ought to also reveal the ways that we (teachers, researchers, community members) are in process with them. We should reveal how their emerging cultures and stories impact and alter our own in-process understandings.

Vignette #10: (January 2013)

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. After Abby spent the morning walking alongside Ms. Bee for a march honoring Dr. King, she came to a new group that’s just beginning. Elijah, a former student in the Native American literature class formed this group because he thought students needed more support and more opportunities to think through what they learned in that class and to see how that new knowledge interacts in spaces beyond schooling walls. ²⁴ Invitations were sent to students to join us on this afternoon. Abby accepted the invitation, along with eight others. Elijah hands out printed copies of an article titled “Tucson schools bans books by Chicano and Native American authors.” ²⁵ We read the short article and the conversation pivots to discussions of how this is connected to the ethnic studies ban.

Abby says, “That law is stupid. Even today everyone’s just basically lying and saying that they’re all about ethnicity, and we’re all gonna be together and then they go and do stuff like that. Cuz like during the march this morning, I was hearing it, like how Desert View High School was saying how they are all about different cultures coming together and then they try to take away the Native American powwow that’s led by students there. On the float, they had like a bunch of people holding hands and saying that our skin color doesn’t matter, we can all come together and then they’re just secretly trying to get rid of stuff. People are going to start realizing it.”

Abby continues her participation in the group for the better part of the spring, making sense of her new reality with others in coffee shops, in pizza parlors, in community parks. She’s listening and being heard.

Ethnic Studies and the Realization of Whiteness

Such courses counter mainstream curricula by centering stories of minoritized and Indigenous communities. Part of this countering places Whiteness on a backdrop of settler colonial legacies. In this process, the camouflage is removed. Whiteness becomes visible; it is realized. And for some, this realization of Whiteness is occurring for the first time in ethnic studies courses. Instead of invalidating their positions and perspectives as they work to make sense of their identity, we ought to, as Ms. Bee illustrates, provide room for future growth by supporting where they are now in the hopes that changes will occur in the future. We ought to do so in caring ways fueled by pedagogies that help to heal the ruptures of thought. Classrooms should be places to share truths where our stories merge in spaces between us. Ms. Bee opened up spaces to share their worries, to reveal the ways curriculum limits and the ways pedagogy can inspire. She created space for students to lead discussions, to share their truths, and made sure they did so in compassionate ways. This work requires centering discussions upon race—which includes forwarding pedagogy that helps students see how Whiteness operates as a race—and opens up conversations about the systemic nature of racism in the United States. To disrupt oppressive cultural norms, pedagogies that forward love, compassion, empathy, and a new conceptualizing of culture as alive and constantly in construction, are needed.

Vignette #11: Disrupting to Embrace (July 2016)

We can both feel that the conversation is starting to come to a close. I ask if there was anything she’d like to discuss that we didn’t have a chance to talk about. She takes a moment to think, and says: “Well, before this class, I couldn’t talk to my family. I couldn’t tell them anything and when we came in there, we were . . . I don’t know how to say, we were connected, we were just . . . we were ready to listen to each other and she kind of taught us . . . just to slow down and try to hear everybody else’s story. And . . . that’s kind of the only way you’re gonna learn, is by . . . and I guess, once you hear someone’s story and they actually come out and tell you their personal life, there’s a trust built there because you’re just not gonna go to anybody and say that. It takes a lot of heart and warming up to, to be able to say that. Yeah, and those feelings extended to other spaces too.”

“Hmm. Where did it extend to? Are you talking about time? Are you talking about different classrooms?” I say.

“Time, conversations. I mean, whenever I go and travel somewhere, I try to look at it beyond what’s just there. You know, I want to learn the history, I want to know what happened, and it’s because of that class. Cause before, I was just brainwashed. I was from Colorado . . . hillbilly place where they were really strict about what they put in the books, and that’s just about everywhere. But . . . we weren’t being lied to anymore in that class.”

“For those who might be on the fence about taking this course at Desert View, what would you say to them?”

“I guess I’d . . . probably start out by telling them, ‘Everything you know is probably not true, and . . . it’s gonna be hard to sit there and listen to the stories and really absorb and accept the fact of all the bad things that happened, but it’s important for you to understand what’s gone on in this world and why people act the way they do now. And there’s nothing like this class. And if that was just the title, Native American literature, you know, you wouldn’t know a backdrop of . . . how . . . intertwined it would be.’ I’d just tell them it’s worth it to just open your eyes and understand the truth and maybe learn something about yourself.”

Implications: Ethnic Studies as Needed Disruptions to Promote Healing

In the processes of helping students see and learn about the ways their cultures are emerging and interacting requires that we value the co-construction of knowledges by listening, by speaking, by developing relationships so that we can enter into discussions fueled by dialogic listening and voicing. In this development, we may begin to consider our self in relation to others. We may begin to see how we may be passively or actively denying others’ existence. And, in seeing ourselves, we may start to envision the ways we can alter our truths in ways that align, value, and welcome the truths of others. Part of that work requires that we disrupt and rupture our cultures and ways of being and knowing, in order to make room for new understandings that include the truths of others to take hold. More opportunities for such disruptions to dominant hegemonic paradigms, I argue, should not be solely on the periphery of schools (i.e., 12^th grade elective ethnic studies courses), but centered in courses that students are required to take. In other words, ethnic studies courses should be the foundation for all core courses and not neatly separated from the curricula. All students should have opportunities to understand their identities and knowledges in motion, and in transition, and guided by compassionate educators who reveal their own navigations of identity. In this way, more students may have opportunities to disrupt Whiteness by making it visible in more spaces and worth interrogating and deconstructing so as to make room for those knowledges often left in the margins of schooling (or not at all).

I continue to ponder questions that Abby has helped make clearer: Whose history, whose stories are being acknowledged and centered in schooling spaces? Whose are systematically ignored and at what consequence? What happens when we forward ethnic studies curricula that are rooted in love, compassion, and connections? How might we embody the hope, promise, and possibility we seek in our shared futurities? What are the collective benefits of ethnic studies curricula that are rooted in pedagogies that create opportunities to sustain, to revitalize, and to disrupt cultural understandings in order to heal?