UC Riverside

With the increasingly racialized schooling and social contexts of the ongoing anti-immigrant, anti-Latinx, and xenophobic national climate, there is an urgency to examine how K-12 Ethnic Studies (ES) classrooms can support Latinx students with navigating and confronting racialized oppression in their world(s). K-12 ES has much promise to develop, maintain or extend students’ awareness of racial injustice, but it has been strongly contended in K-12 contexts and there is concern that it will lose its core critical analysis of racism and white supremacy as it is institutionalized. Aligned with sociocultural conceptualizations of literacies that acknowledge their existence within inequitable power relations, this qualitative case study explored how students’ racial literacies—the language and praxis to “read” the existence of institutional racism and to disrupt its effects (Guinier, 2004; Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Sealey-Ruiz, 2013; Skerrett, 2011) were developed, sustained or extended in two 9th grade ES classrooms. With special attention paid to teacher pedagogy, the racial literacy development of Latinx students in ES classrooms at one high school were explored via multiple data sources including, observations, student and teacher interviews, and review and analysis of literacy artifacts. Building on the narratives and experiences of six 9th grade Latinx students and two ES teachers this dissertation study traces a four-stage process of racial literacy development (RLD) for students along with underscoring how racially literacy is embodied in teacher’ pedagogies along four core racially literate stances. Given the significant role that teachers’ racial literacies play in sustaining the revolutionary potential of high school ES, this study has implications for informing the large-scale institutionalization of ES across California high schools by significantly contributing to the ongoing conversation around what types of teachers and what type of pedagogies are needed to teach ES courses effectively. Furthermore, this study extends the concept of racial literacy to encompass the specific racialized socio-political experiences of Latinx students at this historical moment and within the immediate context of a working class predominantly Latinx and immigrant community.