Education

Social movement practitioners have grappled for years with the role that ideology and consciousness play in bringing about social change. This article asks how lived experiences of institutional exclusion shape the political consciousness of undocumented Latino students. Through my ethnographic study of undocumented youth activists working on a mainstream legislative campaign, I posit that not only is oppositional consciousness a spectrum, as previous theorists have claimed, but it is also, in a Gramscian sense, forged out of the dialectic between ideas that are both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. It is not the case that counter-hegemonic ideas win over, even temporarily, leading to oppositional consciousness. Rather, oppositional consciousness is forged through the constant negotiation between the two. This article draws on 18 months of fieldwork and is a critical inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of ideas and ideology in building social change.

This article draws on my experience as an adjunct professor in the Master’s program of a Department of Mexican-American Studies at a large, public university in California.  Seeing my students’ struggles with writing, I conceived of a set of practices of writing mentorship anchored by a series of Writing Workshops held in summer 2012.  In this article, I document the pedagogy and content of these Writing Workshops in order to think about the unique struggles and opportunities Chicana/o Master’s students face in the writing process and to provide an outline for other instructors interested in developing a practice of writing mentorship.

The lives of undocumented youth are fundamentally characterized by the legal and social contradiction that arises from growing up in the United States yet facing barriers to full participation in US society. As such, the production of migrant youth “illegality” is marked by both distinct forms of regulation and exclusion as well as a sustained connection to institutions central to US society. In this article, I bring 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented Latino youth activists in California into conversation with Stuart Hall’s notion of (re-)articulation in order to identify three articulatory practices among undocumented youth – brokering illegality, staking a claim to “citizen” participation and breaching the code of silence. I argue that the tension between their juridical identities as undocumented migrants and their sub- jective identities as US-raised children has served as a catalyst to political action among undocumented youth activists in California.

The increased visibility of undocumented youth in the past decade has chal- lenged public conceptions of who undocumented immigrants are, what they look like, and what role they play in US society. Undocumented Latino migrant youth have complicated the immigration debate not just through their presence, but also through the development of a vibrant social movement born of their experience, making clear that the country’s outdated immigration policy does not reflect the complex reality of immigrants, migration, and the nation. Drawing on Nicholas De Genova’s work on border spectacle, I argue that activism among undocumented Latino youth serves as a “counter-spectacle” that challenges dominant conceptions of (il)legality and undocumented workers, disrupting the link between “criminality” and “illegality.” Using ethnographic data collected from undocumented youth activists in California since 2007, I examine the ways in which their civil disobedience and testimonio act as counter-spectacle and shift conceptions of citizenship in a country entrenched in a debate around who has the right to belong.

In recent years, researchers have paid increased attention to the challenges undocumented students face in accessing higher education. However, within this growing field of inquiry, the unique experiences of undocumented students at Jesuit universities have been largely unexamined. Building on the groundbreaking study of the situation of undocumented students at the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States, which was published as the Immigrant Student National Position Paper (ISNPP), this article presents findings collected at the University of San Francisco as a part of a university-wide effort to assess the needs of undocumented students on campus. Three key themes emerged from this mixed-method study: (1) social justice is a draw and an anchor for undocumented students, (2) an institutional culture of silence breeds silence as an individual navigational strategy among undocumented students, and (3) unique financial stresses shape feelings of belonging for undocumented students. These themes both corroborate the ISNPP report and build a more nuanced understanding of the undocumented student experience on Jesuit campuses by highlighting the influence of institutional climate on student voice and student experience at the University of San Francisco.

Despite high levels of disengagement in urban literacy classrooms, few teachers have seen fit to explore spoken word -the performance of poetry -as a tool to engage students in literacy. Spoken word poetry serves as a powerful means of self-representation for youth that are traditionally portrayed as threatening, menaces to society that do not know how to productively manage their temperaments. Drawing on prior, spoken word, poetry research in education, the article examines the impact of a performance poetry unit on students' critical thinking, literacy and voice from the perspective of a teacher/researcher in an urban classroom. Bridging the critical and the performance aspects of spoken word poetry in a South Los Angeles high school composition classroom, this article offers a concrete example of this praxis and reports on a curriculum project that empowered students to examine issues of privilege, social control and oppression in U.S. society. The article concludes with pedagogical implications for using, and going beyond, performance poetry as a teaching tool for creating studentcentred, critical discursive spaces in schools. 1 To emphasize the oral communication and literary elements of this writing unit, I referred to "spoken word" as "performance poetry" to my students. Similarly, performance poetry and spoken word are used interchangeably throughout this article to mean the same thing.

that reflect a concern for students' lives. Specifically, it discusses the impact of students performing autoethnographies )-cultural narratives that build toward critical social analysis-as a means toward increasing critical self-reflection and building compassionate relationships between youth of color with fractured collective identities. Such approaches, as I argue, can tap into youth confusion and anger in order to engage them as critical readers, writers, and oral communicators. The findings suggest that autoethnographies increased students' knowledge of self and, upon recognizing one another's all-too-familiar struggles, the classroom climate became more conducive to constructing a critical common identity among youth of color. In this way, the article has implications for building classroom relationships that make for more effective pedagogies engaging dispossessed, working-class children of color with culturally relevant critical literacy teaching practices.

This article, recently published in Urban Education, analyzes teaching that begins with the realities, ideologies, and articulations of dispossessed youth of color to shift perceptions of cultural deficits into potential academic strengths that are also critical. Drawing on culturally relevant, critical pedagogical, and critical literacy theories to understand the educational needs of historically dispossessed cultural groups in the United States and propose a humanizing pedagogy, this article offers critical participatory teacher analysis that suggests this can be done by (a) agitating students politically, (b) arousing their critical curiosity, and (c) inspiring self and social transformation.

This article examines the usefulness of engaging culturally relevant texts with five levels of analysis to foster critical thinking and academic writing. Teachers who are not critical of seemingly a theoretical, ahistorical reading methods often overlook the ways that cultural biases in instructional methods ignore the cultural and critical needs of urban students of color (Bartolome, 1994; Morrell, 2008). Using five levels of analysis (explicit, implicit, theoretical, interpretive, and applicable) addresses this concern by challenging students to comprehend the central ideas of texts, interrogate in terms of social justice, connect concepts to their immediate realities and extrapolate useful ideas to apply to their everyday lives.<p> </p> <!--EndFragment-->

Breaking down the social, political, and cultural processes through which race, class, and gender worldviews are established, ideological literacies help students look closely at the intricate, contra- dictory meanings in texts. The purpose of developing ideological literacies in urban youth is so they become more socially conscious of the communication strategies guiding their identities. This article highlights the ways ideologies are consumed, re-produced, and often internalized by marginalized youth of color in urban communities, ultimately, offering a teacher-oriented analysis of using ideo- logical literacies as an empowering tool for students to examine issues of privilege, social control, and oppression in U.S. society.