Realizing students’ every day realities: Community analysis as a model for social justice

This article examines the implications and effect of the Community Analysis (CA) Project assignment that we utilize in the Multicultural Education (MCE) course1 at New Mexico State University, located in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The CA enables pre-service teachers to critically examine, through a social justice lens, the manifestations and intersectionalities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, ability, and religion in PreK-12 students’ communities, which may be rejected and ignored, or embraced, serving to connect students’ lives to learning contexts and opportunities in their schools. The CA compels pre-service teachers to analyze systemic inequities and inequalities in communities which impact the everyday lives of students. They discover organic knowledge possessed by students and families to bridge students’ knowledge and the knowledge promoted within the school curriculum. Pre-service teachers also contemplate how their privileged or disadvantaged identity statuses intersect with their future students’ privileged or disadvantaged statuses, or impact how they read communities

Unmasking, Exposing, and Confronting: Critical Race Theory, Tribal Critical Race Theory and Multicultural Education

Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) offer the possibility of unmasking, exposing, and confronting continued colonization within educational contexts and societal structures, thus, transforming those contexts and structures for Indigenous People. Utilizing CRT and TribalCrit to support and inform “Multicultural Education as social justice,” we rid ourselves, our educational institutions, and ultimately the larger society from the “food, fun, festivals, and foolishness” form of Multicultural Education that maintains or propagates colonization

[Un]consciously [Dis]serving English Learners: A Reflection of Bilingual Teacher Educators on the Border

We are teacher educators along the Mexico/U.S. border. Jeanette is a Tsalagi woman who has some knowledge of her tribal language, but who does not have fluency. Lida and Blanca work with elementary teacher candidates in an on-site bilingual block in a local partner school, while Jeanette teaches the undergraduate and graduate multicultural education course, which is required for admission to the teacher education program. In the elementary teacher education program, the teacher candidates participate in the on-site blocks for one year where they are immersed in the classroom four mornings a week. Teacher candidates work with cooperating teachers—the licensed classroom teachers—during the mornings and participate in methods courses after practicum hours