Podcast: Bridging Through High School Ethnic Studies

Transcript

Intro:
Hello, and welcome to this special episode of Who Belongs? A podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. This episode is part of a series of talks and panel discussions recorded during the breakout sessions of our Othering & Belonging conference that took place in Oakland this past April. This session is titled Bridging Through High School Ethnic Studies, and was curated by OBI's Hossein Ayazi. It includes panelists from the UC Berkeley High School Ethnic Studies Initiative, Julie Yick, Mike Espinoza, Jason Munoz, and Antmen Pimentel Mendoza. Together, with the audience, they explore concepts that are essential to high school ethnic studies courses, discuss what those concepts look and feel like, and how to effectively bring them into the classroom. The discussion is moderated by Victoria Robinson, the director of the American Culture Center at UC Berkeley. Find more episodes from this series on our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs.

Victoria Robinson:
Welcome, everybody. What a great room. So we're happy to be bringing you into conversation with UC Berkeley's High School Ethnic Studies Initiative. We began this initiative two years ago. It's a collaboration of the history and Social Sciences project led by director, Jason Munoz. Yeah, hey. Yeah, let's. We all love Jason. The Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and also the American Culture Center where I'm the director. I've also been an ethnic studies faculty for 23 years at UC Berkeley, so it's a bit of a long journey.

So HSESI is an attempt to, in some ways, give good work, good cover using UC Berkeley's intense resources, faculty expertise, longtime historical commitment to support ethnic studies. Teachers and educators, either from where you are right now teaching or where you want to be going into the graduation requirement rolling out '25, `26. There's a number of ways that we're trying to build the initiative and we'll show you some of those resources.

If you want to check out the High School Ethnic Studies initiative online, you'll see that one of the things that we've really been, I think, building momentum around is bringing scholars into conversation with their work and thinking about how that could come into the classroom. We have an immense amount of different topics that we're covering, everything from Waldo Martin and Ula Taylor, faculty in history and African-American Studies at UC Berkeley, talking about the legacy of the Black Panther party and how that might enter the classroom, to questions around the women of all Red Nations, the American Indian Movement, and how oral histories ethnographies come alive from that history into our classrooms, and how we can actually bring that as pedagogy into the classroom. I would urge you to check it all out. The last one with Cal Beckham was around creating healing in spaces of difficult conversations. No, that wasn't the last one. The last one that we had was with our Pacific Islander colleagues on campus about how to teach and be in conversation with PI communities. So yes, but it's a never-ending set of opportunities.

We are actually urging you and hoping that you will also be in conversation with us about what you'd like to see UC Berkeley do. We want it to be a partnership with educators. So we have some ideas, but we know we haven't been able to capture all ideas of what you might want from our relationship. Also, there's two other things coming up that are really exciting.

So last year, we offered a week-long workshop at UC Berkeley for Bay Area educators to come into conversation with each other and, again, people at Berkeley archivists, librarians, oral historians, our faculty, again, and you as peer-to-peer contacts, thinking about how, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities, what do you want to build? It was so successful that this year we're offering it again, and we're expanding how many people can participate, thanks to our wonderful Multicultural Community Center colleagues, the director of which is here.

Jason Munoz:
I also like to remind everyone it's free.

Victoria Robinson:
Oh, and it's free. It's free, free, free, free. Yeah, and you get a T-shirt, and we feed you, so that's good. But also, here on the right-hand side at the bottom, this is a panel that we had last year, that will also happen again this year, of the 69ers, so the original TWLF organizers. You might find this really incredible, but there has never really been a place where we're gathering oral histories, archives, lesson plans, curriculum around what created ethnic studies, but we are now. So if you pick up a flyer outside, we have the draft of the website. It will eventually be called Twlf.berkeley.edu. Right now we have the dummy site up for you. It's not going live until after this conference because we want to get your feedback, so have a look at it, see what makes sense on that site and, again, as educators, what might be missing.

So again, we don't want to release something without conversations with you. And so, with that said, we'd love you to do a share and parent share, share and pair? And turn to your neighbor and address this question for a couple of minutes. What aspects of the field of ethnic studies are essential and demand a place in the high school ethnic studies instruction? Make a new friend. Before we hear back some of what you just shared with each other, can we have a show of hands in the room, who right now is teaching ethnic studies? Yay, and who in the room is planning to teach ethnic studies? Well done. Excellent. Great. That's nice to know. So anybody want to share crucial aspects for teaching ethnic studies in high school? There was a lot of chatter. This sounds like my class. This is like my classroom.

Piya Kashyap:
Hi everyone. My name is Piya, and I teach ninth grade ethnic studies at a private high school in Marin, called Marin Academy. This is my second year teaching the course, and I think one of the crucial aspects that I've found is giving the students the language to really describe their own identities and their positionality, and so we do that early in the course. We introduce them to the terms of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, nationality, and then they write an auto-ethnography about those terms. I was just telling my partner that I was really excited to lead a professional development day with our faculty and staff and having them go through the auto-ethnography exercise, because it's such an important foundation of language and terminology for our students, and it's so important for the adults on campus to have that same foundation.

Victoria Robinson:
Wonderful. Thank you, so maybe you'll lead one of our workshops in the summer. Anybody else? Yeah, this is a recruitment tool. You want to share?

Speaker 4:
Yeah. So I don't teach ethnic studies. I teach US history, but I've taken the ethnic study standards from middle school from Oakland and tried to incorporate them into what I teach, and I think counter narratives, the power of stories, is something that my students really resonate with. And so, I think that's essential, and then Anne, who I'm speaking with, had mentioned helping students understand the dynamics of systems, and power, and oppression, and privilege.

Victoria Robinson:
Great. I think we've got a lot of lovely stuff in the room to go for. Should we start? Yeah. So also, because you might want to take these slides home with you, on Monday, they'll be uploaded to the High School Ethnic Studies Initiative website. They could be useful as an exercise at your school. So with that said, I'm going to pass the mic to Jason.

Jason Munoz:
All right. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today on your Saturday. I'm honored that you took the time to share this space on a day that typically educators are rightfully resting, so thank you for that. So the reason why we pose this question to you all today is because this is really the thesis of what we wanted to discuss with you all today, some of the things that are really essential to ethnic studies courses, but not just really defining and laying out what those are, but really understanding what it means to teach those things, what it should look like, what it should feel like to have those experiences from the student perspective in your classrooms. We did spend some time last summer, at the workshops week that we had that Victoria mentioned, kind of working around this question.

The way that we phrased it was really around, "For high school offering to be considered an ethnic studies course, it must include..." Now, there's plenty of different frameworks that are available on the online, and a lot of professional developments, and a lot of different spaces. Folks will have opinions on what are some essential elements into ethnic studies courses. In California, there is a very controversial whole model curriculum that will tell you some of the things that are the guidelines and the essential understandings of ethnic studies, and this is not necessarily to dismiss, enlist, or adopt anyone. These are some that in our conversations around ethnic studies, course development, these are some very essential elements to have in a high school ethnic studies course, for sure.

The first one that came up for us, that we identified, was making sure that we spoke to critical conversations around oppression. I always like to ask educators, if you're thinking about this as an essential topic, what are the pieces of vocabulary or understandings that your students would need to be able to understand what the heck that just means? Another thing that came up for us was healing and agency in the face of oppression. Important, because as we understand when we learn some of the conversations or we create some of those conversations around oppression with our students, that has an impact with them, with anybody at any stage of life, but certainly if we're teaching it to high school students, and it's often coming in middle school or ninth grade. We're talking about 13 and 14-year-old young people. Creating the space for healing and agency feels just very primary to this work.

Something else that came up for us, an understanding of coalition as a concept and solidarity as a concept, and how those will land. Again, thinking about what the programming, the construction of your ethnic studies course is going to be. These are pieces that just have a home in there. It needs to have this included. And the last one we felt definitely needed to be included was explicit connections to community. Is this an exhaustive list? No, but these are things that, as we were having discussions about what needs to be an ethnic studies course, these came up for us. Now, with this understanding, we had conversations with our group over the summer, and thinking about what would be the program to develop an ethnic studies course. My colleague, Victoria, and Keith, our other colleague, who's in charge of the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley, our conversations creating the ethnic studies course felt like they were missing an important piece, and that was the affective piece of learning about these.

So we actually had an exercise, and one of our panel here, who I'll introduce shortly, was part of this exercise, where we spent some time refining our thinking of those essential concepts, those four essential understandings. Again, knowing there's many more, but we sort of zeroed in on those and said, in order to resist that sort of banking information model of understanding, just collecting information, "What is systems of oppression?" instead of just having that be the model of understanding in our ethnic studies courses, what we wanted to do is spend some time with our educators to make sure that they made an effort to surface the affective and emotional relationships to those concepts. It's not enough to know what we mean by critical conversations about oppression, but as an educator, thinking about what that looks like to learn about critical conversations around oppression and what it feels like, as a student, to have that experience of learning about critical conversations, centering oppression, and down the list of all those times.

So they had an activity. Again, those things that you do in professional developments typically, where there's a poster, and someone's putting sticky notes on a poster, and we collected all the posters and we synthesized all the information. It was great data that we collected, and we felt like we learned so much from what the teachers in that space had shared, that it'd be a sin just to not share that with the broader educational community out there. So this is part of what this work is today, is to share, "This is what teachers are saying about this work, and we'd love to hear what you have to say about it, because you all who are already teaching it or about to be teaching ethnic studies, this feels like something that's essential for you to engage with as well." All right. I do want to collect your thoughts on this, and you'll see I went QR-code happy. It's a thing now these days, I guess, but you'll see, if you pull out your devices, that QR code will take you to a poll, sorry, called Mentimeter, what have you.

But the idea there is you get a chance to sort of give your feedback, as we're going along, and we'll have our panel discuss their thoughts on this, a panel of educators of ethnic studies, I'll introduce them to you in a moment, but as you're hearing from them and other ideas about thoughts, questions, additions to whatever that we're mentioning here in the discussion here come up for you, please feel free to add those. We invite those. I'm not going to take it personally if all of a sudden you're in the middle of this and you're looking at your phone and your furiously typing something with your thumbs, I get that it might be this, it might also be something else. That's fine. So take a moment and sit with that. The idea is, what do these topics, what do these general ideas look like and feel like in a high school ethnic studies classroom? That's the prompt, and of course, I'll make sure that that QR code will stay there on the screen as we're discussing each of these four individual elements, which we know this is not an exhaustive list.

I'll say that again. So while you're thinking about that, one last chance to capture the QR code, with your phones or device, whatever. Also, and it's been a while since I've held a clicker, so I get to point with my laser pointer. Over here is the website. I'm not pointing at you, Julie. Sorry. Over here, that was where the QR code leads to as well, so just in case, later on you're like, "Ah, my phone died," or whatever. These are the prompts, and with this in mind, I'd like to introduce you to some educators that we brought in today to discuss these ideas, right? So with us are these folks, and it occurs to me that we are seated out of order from the way that we were described on the panel here. So why don't we take a moment, and I'll ask my panelists to share their names, some information about themselves, and really, for the sake of the folks who are in this space, share how you came to be an ethnic studies educator. At the end of this, I'll share mine as well.

Mike Espinoza:
Hello, everyone. My name is Mike Espinoza. He/him pronouns. I am a 38-year-old, Cis, brown man with short and black hair, combed back, shortened beard, and I'm wearing a tan shirt. I'm a ethnic studies teacher over at Campbell Union High School District. This year I'm only teaching one section, because I'm also the ethnic studies TOSA at the same district, and so I've been doing that role a little bit more this year. And so, in terms of my journey towards ethnic studies, it started later. So growing up in my K-12 education, I had no ethnic studies, nothing at all.

I, actually, even in college, I was an English major, and really didn't get it there either, so my exposure to anything even remotely related to ethnic studies was through activism on San Jose State's campus. And so, working with those students, and those students were in ethnic studies, and those students were connected with the professors who were teaching ethnic studies, I was able then to get a per free kind of ethnic studies education, and realized I chose the wrong thing, realized, "Oh. I've been missing this for so long," but I was too much into it. I knew I was going to be a teacher and stuff, but that's the budding of it, and so I knew that, going into my teaching career, I wanted to do at least social justice education.

It was really piecemeal for me. At the beginning, it was a lot of self-teaching, things like that, and it wasn't until I started going to more PDs and, in particular, Institute for Teachers of Color, where I was able to meet with a coalition of teachers who do this work. Then, I got the information about ethnic studies and incorporating it beyond even history. And so, that's where the seeds started to get sown. Since then, I've been able to create ethnic literature at our district, which is ethnic studies integrated with English, and then now I'm TOSA, so that's kind of like my journey in a nutshell.

Jason Munoz:
Thank you, Mike.

Julie Yick Wong Koppel:
Thank you, Mike. Good morning everybody. Welcome. My name is Julie Yick Wong Koppel, and I just want to say that I'm so thankful to be sharing this space and community with my fellow panelists and Jason and Victoria, and also just very humbled to be in this space where we have so many passionate, creative, and dedicated educators. While I come into this as a high school ethnic studies teacher, I definitely come into this as a learner as well, just trying to learn every day. So I think I forgot to mention in the beginning, I use she/her pronouns. For accessibility purposes, I have dark brown, curly hair, and I'm wearing a purple T-shirt.

So in terms of my journey into ethnic studies, for me, a lot of this connects to my family. I come from a Chinese, Irish-American family, and so for my parents, my grandmother, and great-grandparents, part of that journey has been the struggle of moving here and the dreams that they've had. So I say that just to honor those, and also just learning from the community advocates and the folks that have been pushing for ethnic studies for decades. Just with a lot of gratitude, I see people in the room that have been a part of the journey, and I'm so grateful for them. Currently, I teach four high school ethnic studies classes. I live in San Jose and teach at Mountain View High School, and I had the opportunity to serve as our district's ethnic studies curriculum task force chair. And so, it's been just a learning journey in collaboration with a lot of dedicated folks. Thanks.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza:
Hi. Oh, go ahead.

Jason Munoz:
No. I was saying just, "Thank you, Julie." Yeah, it's all yours.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza:
Hi. Good morning, everyone. My name is Antmen Pimentel Mendoza. I use they/he/she pronouns. For accessibility, I'll offer a short self-description. I'm a Filipino, non-binary person in my early-30s. I have short, black hair, slicked back. I'm wearing a black T-shirt. Thank you all for being here. My self-descriptor on the slides is I'm the director of the UC Berkeley Multicultural Community Center, so I'm not a high school ethnic studies educator, so I don't want to name that, but my journey and, I think, my perspective on this panel is in part I am working on an ethnic studies pedagogical project in a co-curricular space, right? So I have this perspective of this question around connection to community, how does ethnic studies pedagogy live outside of the classroom and within the connections that folks are making, both beyond the classroom and in the interstitial spaces that folks navigate on campuses, like the university, but also in high schools and through K-12, broadly?

My own journey, I went to public high schools at public schools in San Diego, California. Then, I went to UC Berkeley, where I was an ethnic studies student. I majored in gender women's studies, minored in rhetoric and ethnic studies. While at Cal, I was an intern, a student worker at the Multicultural Community Center where I work now. After doing that experience for a couple of years, I left campus for a while, and I returned in 2019 in a staff role at the Multicultural Community Center. Just the project looks like working with about 25 to 30 undergraduate students who are our intern cohort every year to put on these projects and programs through the space, as well as hosting and holding a space that day-to-day serves as a community hub, study space, and organizing space, including a lending library, a healing and learning garden, a small kitchenette where we offer ready-to-grab-and-go kind of meals, so that's kind of the texture of the work, a little bit sample of that.

Jason Munoz:
Thank you very much. So I'll very briefly just say my name is Jason Munoz, he/him/él pronouns. For accessibility purposes. I'm a 47-year-old Latina male, short, black hair, and a green and blue shirt. For the purposes of my being in this panel, of course I'm going to be the moderator, but I do want to share that I come to this space having been an ethnic studies educator here in the city of Oakland at Fremont High School in East Oakland, where I was part of the team, those are my colleagues in the house, where I was part of the team that piloted ethnic studies for OUSD way back in 2014, which feels like a really long time ago now.

Part of the work that I do now is I do provide professional development to schools around the Bay Area, just helping support them with the work of developing their ethnic studies courses and their programs, and really just, not from a huge background of having studied ethnic studies formally, but having been in a classroom where I was mandatolled by someone who kind of saved my life by making this choice to tap me to do this, asked me, "Hey, I see the thing that you teach in your history course. You're already sort of teaching ethnic studies. Would you mind being part of the pilot, do that formally for the city that you live in?"

It hit me like, "Yeah, we should absolutely have this for this particular community," and here I am, this right time, right place to be able to do that. I hope that, for some of you who are taking on the work of developing the ethnic studies course for your communities right now, for someone, you were that right person in the right time, right place, because here you are trying to figure out just how to do that a little bit better, and that's what's needed, and why we asked you all or we convened this sort of meeting today, to make sure that that was surfaced, like it's important, you're doing it, and here's some ways to do it well. All right, so with that, I want to sort of jump into our conversations.

And so, the first thing that we introduced to our panel, I'm sorry, our group of educators last summer when we asked them to sort of consider those essential parts of ethnic studies, we can mention critical conversations around oppression that needs to be in your ethnic studies course, but as opposed to just defining it, we wanted the teachers to interact with this idea; what do those with these look like and feel like in a high school ethnic studies classroom? I know it's a little bit hard to see, as will this be, because these are some of the responses that educators gave. If this is impossible for you to read, by the way, and you're in the back, please know that on that same application where you're looking at your phone, you'll probably be able to see those because I loaded them in as the responses.

So if you're scrolling through that, you might actually be able to see what some of the teachers had to say, all right? For our panel here, I'm hoping that they could take a moment to sort of think about that question, critical conversations about oppression. What did those look like and feel like in high school ethnic studies classrooms? If you all wouldn't mind taking a moment, starting with the mic over there at the end, share your thoughts around this. You can respond to that in your own or in terms of what was added here. You were actually in the room where we were adding these, so I'm not sure if any of these are yours. They were all anonymous. But yeah, I'm interested to know what are your thoughts around this and sort of the effective part of this instruction in ethnic studies?

Mike Espinoza:
Yeah. So I think, for me, this topic, obviously, feels very heavy, right? It's, obviously, one of the most important parts of ethnic studies, and yet it's also the most difficult to get through. And so, for me as an educator, one of the biggest struggles I had early on when teaching ethnic studies was balance, right? You could fill a whole four years of just talking about the atrocities of so many peoples, right? And so, it's really just like, where's that balance between this and the other points that we're going to talk about today? And so, that's really important. In the classroom, for me, I think it really starts with, and a lot of ethnic studies courses start in this way, is with identity, right? And so, having the students think about themselves, thinking about their lived experiences, their realities, and getting them to really connect those stories, those narratives to then the outer world, right? Why do we feel this way? Why is this happening?

And really, asking those questions of why is the way that I start to bridge the concept of identity, like the surface level concept of identity, to then these more critical conversations around oppression, right? Because when you start doing those, you ask those questions of why, like why do we see these statistics of this group of people who are struggling in this way? Then, it's like, "I don't know. It's just like that." It's like, well, actually it's not, and so that's when you start having those conversations. I think, for me, and this is where I'll pass it off, I think for me the most important word in here is critical, right? Because you could talk about oppression, oppression, oppression, but to be critical about it gets the students, especially young students, to the point where they're interrogating, right?

And so, now they're interrogating the oppression instead of just, "Oh, hey. This happened, and it was really sad."

And so, it's like, "Okay. Why though? Why?" and so, that interrogation is really important, and so I think the criticality is essential when you're having these conversations.

Julie Yick Wong Koppel:
Thank you, Mike. Such insightful reflections, and as I'm thinking about this topic, I'd like to say first that I think the important conversations and critical conversations around oppression in an ethnic studies class, I think, are grounded in, first of all, the community. Like day one, we're really getting to know the students and cultivating that space, and we try to really ground ourselves in principles around building empathy, community, and solidarity. So I say that I kind of think of it like an ecosystem or a garden that we're tending to every day, and that allows some of those trusting relationships to develop over time so that when we're having these really important conversations around very hard, difficult topics, I think, both in our current context as well as historically, just to kind of paint a picture briefly in our unit that's on immigration and migration, students are learning, for example, about racist and xenophobic immigration policies, right?

Ranging from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to Mexican repatriation, and forced relocation and deportation of Mexican and Mexican-American families, through the current day of Trump travel ban in Muslim-majority countries and so forth. So I think when we're having these conversations, again, it's kind of re-grounding and humanizing this space, and for students to also know that there's agency. That's why I really appreciate the theme and the structure of our conversation. I know we'll get more to that piece in a moment, but I'd just like to say that, like Mike, I think we've really grappled with and are still trying to find that balance. But if we're studying these topics, and slavery and colonization, and then we leave the students there, that can be depressing, or people that feel angry or all sorts of different emotions. So, just want to say that community and relationship building, I think, is really essential, which I'm sure all of you, as teachers, are really skillful in doing with your students.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza:
Yeah. A couple of thoughts that I have about what it feels like, first, is that it feels like vulnerability, which necessitates then moving slowly and deliberately. I think part of that feeling deliberate in that question of what it would look like is kind of a dogged commitment to citation and being rigorous in citation, so that when these students are coming to vulnerability, they understand that their sharing personal narrative is in lineage as opposed to just contextual context lists, like we're asking you to talk about yourself in the classroom now and said to be like this, and there's a lineage of this. There's a lineage of saying that the personal is political. There's a lineage of saying and thinking that people of color, as a term, has a context. It's not just a physical descriptor. It's Black woman's leadership in creating coalition of women of color.

We have to understand that so that when we ask you to learn these terms, to talk about your own experiences, that there is context, that there is lineage, that we are not coming into this contextless world, and partially because I think the other thing this feels like is grief. I know both of these feel negative, but I think this feels like grief, not just because of the grief of learning things about American history, the reality of colonialism and the Empire, but there's also the grief of, why didn't I do this before? Why aren't my other teachers doing this? There needs to be the space, for the room for that. I am glad the next conversation is about healing and agency, because it's going to be iterative to have the space for the grief, not just because, "Why did this happen? This is so horrible," but also "Why aren't we talking about this all the time? Why is this the first time I'm being asked to talk about this, and why aren't all classrooms like this? Why aren't all the classroom centering the margins the way we are here?" and that's the grief too.

Jason Munoz:
The one thing I would just add to that is the self-reflective piece that you, as an educator, should be engaging with, because if we're asking our students to think about these things, to reflect critically on the way that oppression lands for them and the way that they live in it and experience it, you as an educator, regardless of your positionality, kind of acknowledging your position in relation to their experiences. So, as a CIS, male educator, me talking to students who identify as queer, and talking about them in the classroom and the system of oppression, and realizing my relationship to you is a power dynamic that is real, we have to actually own that as well.

So when we're talking about the critical conversations about oppression, including yourself and the critical conversations of oppression, and sort of reckoning with what you need to reckon with as a person who's now talking about this to a group of living people who are experiencing it in their own terms. Then, I did want to sort move on and give us an opportunity to think about the next part that we ask educators to confront, which is healing an agency in the face of oppression. What did these look like and feel like in high school ethnic studies classrooms?

Again, here's what some of the teachers that we polled, that we got feedback from in our workshop series, said, but again, I'm very curious to know what the educators in this space are thinking. Again, as you're considering what's on the screen, these are available for you to see a little bit more up close and personal on your device. Also, when you're checking that out, we encourage you to share what you think on here as well. If we had the time and space, I'd scroll all of the ones that you're saying here as well, but for the purposes of our conversation, I'm going to ask our panelists to engage with this with your own thoughts, or perhaps just something that's in response to what you're seeing on the screen. This time maybe we'll start this way, and go that way? Yeah, we'll put you on the spot.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza:
Sure, okay. So I think a lot of this healing and agency work, we were talking right before the panel, Julie and I were talking about the arc of the healing and agency, and I hope you can say more about this, but I think partly, also, I'm thinking about the capacity we have to hold for healing and agency in the classroom or in co-curricular spaces would requires us to be sensitive to the shape of it as a spiral, actually, as opposed to just an arc, that the healing and agency looks like an iterative process that we're constantly returning, as folks are navigating that grief I was talking about, as folks are feeling sense of empowerment and, through that empowerment, healing themselves, that every time that happens, you come back to a new level of consciousness.

Coming into consciousness is unwinding, and it is an undoing sometimes, so there's a spaciousness that's required for that healing and the agency, which is also to say that that looks like the space for the educator as well, for the educator to have the room for that, because the undoing for young people can feel affectively explosive, or it can feel like a real pulling in and it can feel really challenging and hard to be the facilitator of that room, the person that's holding the energy and moving the energy when it moves in ways that again, are either explosive, pull in, or as healing an agency takes space. So it looks like that. It feels like that. Also, I think it looks like and feels like developing a tolerance for ambiguity, because the work is not done. The work of the Ethnic studies classroom is not done, right?

So the reason it exists is because these political projects are ongoing, the freedom dreams are still being dreamed, and so the tolerance for being in process, being in ambiguity, being in the gray area, and the tolerance for an unsatisfying answer to the question of, "So then what happened to the afterlives of child slavery?" it's an unsatisfying answer, because anti-blackness is institutional and it's ongoing, and that's part of, I think, what the finding healing agency looks like, is tending to what does it look like when the answer is unsatisfying to still feel agency there, which feels like a non-answer, but it feels like a lot. I'm going to pause my thoughts there.

Julie Yick Wong Koppel:
Thank you, and I really appreciate those reflections. I think, as I started to reflect further about the role of healing and agency and ethnic studies, I was thinking about the complexity of the human experience, and that's something that my colleagues and I have talked a lot about, is helping the students and ourselves to grapple with that complexity. When I'm looking up here, there's so many wonderful ideas, and I'm kind of anchoring myself in thinking about the role of joy and hope. For me, in the classroom and my students, we're really trying to bring in a lot of arts, music, and just kind the celebratory aspects, and also that linking of agency and artistic expression. For example, in our ethnic studies class, again, I'm rooted in San Jose, and I think that incorporation of local history can be really important and empowering for students. So just as an example, we have an inquiry into the burning of San Jose Chinatown.

Usually when we start, we ask students like, "Oh. Have you been to Chinatown?"
They're like, "Yeah, yeah. San Francisco," some of them, right?

You're like, "Oh. Did you know there was not just one, but six different Chinatowns in San Jose, and the last one was burned down in an arson?"
And they're like, "Whoa," right?

And kind of moving through that and getting to this agency piece is kind of reading those primary sources, working in groups, discussing, realizing like, "Whoa, they told the Chinese that they would never rebuild, and that they were going to be run out of here, and within weeks they were rebuilding," and then for the students to draw the through line, and I'll kind of wrap up with this, but when we have the arc up to looking at the rise in anti-Asian hate and other hatred toward other people of color, the students have the chance, and I think they found this very hopeful and uplifting. I was looking at all the different examples of solidarity that we'll get to in a moment, but seeing people, like this incredible artist named Amanda, many of you have probably seen her artwork across New York with these beautiful, vibrant, "We belong here," just visuals. The students love seeing that art, that affirmation, and seeing themselves, so I think all of those opportunities and community circles really create space for the students to try to build that community and have that healing and agency.

Mike Espinoza:
Thank you. Yeah. I think I was talking with my colleagues here earlier as well about this one, and I think, for me, this is the counter in a lot of ways to those conversations around oppression, and so much so that, in my role as TOSA, working with a representative here from Berkeley as well, we incorporate healing and the concept of critical healing into everything. When we did the PDs, we started off like, "We're going to start here, and then we're going to do all these series of PDs, but throughout those we're going to always bring it back to, how are we also thinking about healing? How are we also constantly thinking about that piece, so that way you don't lose sight of that?" Because a lot of times, what could happen is you could compartmentalize it, right? You could kind of build up to it, and then like, "Oh. Well, we'll end the year with the healing one."

Then, it's like, "Man, that's the end of the year already," so you got it. That's the end of the year. They're like-

Julie Yick Wong Koppel:
You beat it after all that?

Mike Espinoza:
They're healing from a lot more. So it's just really critical to constantly think about that, and I appreciate it also bringing up the teacher's role and thinking about our positionality, but also considering healing too. I don't remember the exact question that y'all asked at the summer institute last year, but there was a question about what do teachers need to do to prepare, something along those lines, to teach ethnic studies. And I wrote, not as a joke, I was being honest, but I wrote, "Get therapy and, ultimately, make sure your mind's right before you engage with young people."

A lot of people were like, "Damn. That's the one."

I think it was really rooted in, not necessarily other ethnic studies teachers that I've been engaged with, but just teachers in general, that y'all shouldn't be around young folks. You know what I mean? You're doing a lot of problems right now. And so, I think just thinking about that when we are considering how we move forward as teachers, and are we in the right mind space to be working with this? Can we talk about these things? Because, for me, I appreciate all the positive things up here, but healing on a personal level has been really hard and really messy, and so that's real. Healing can also be tough. And so, I think ultimately, yes, there's a lot of joy at the end of the road, but initially that journey can be very, very difficult, and it's hard for a lot of students to begin that journey too.

So just being very patient with students as well, because a lot of times I've seen, like I've been working with a teacher right now who's frustrated, because she's like, "I'm building this curriculum for this one student."

I'm like, "You just keep doing what you're doing. Your heart's in it, and I know that, but that student may just may not be there right now, and that's okay."

I've had former students, years after graduating, write back to me, message me, and say, "You know what? This one thing, these things that you were saying years ago, I get it now," and so it's like, oh, man. That's such a blessing. So ultimately, I think that healing is just super, super important. I'll end with the way that it physically shows up, and agency too, the way the agency shows up in the space is through all my summative assignments are all student choice. We've been talking about all these things. What is important to you? What do you want to research? What do you want to look into? What do you want to do? Then, we will go with that, and just letting them choose their approach to whatever it is that we've been talking about, and so I think that that's a beautiful way to allow the students to have the agency to embark in their own healing journeys.

Jason Munoz:
Thank you. I'm being mindful of time and make sure that we have a moment to talk about this next piece, which was named, again, as something that we feel was very essential to ethnic studies instruction at the high school level, which was making sure that there's an understanding of the concepts of coalition and solidarity and making sure that that has a place in the instruction or ethnic studies courses, but again, knowing more than just what it means, but also what it looks like and feels like, so this time I'll turn to you again. I'm going to have you lead off again, if you don't mind. I realize that there was a reason why I had us in this order in the first place, so my bad. When you think about what do these look like and feel like in a high school ethnic studies classroom, here's again, some of the ways that educators provided feedback to this prompt, and I'm wondering how these land with you or if there's anything that this question makes you think about and wanting to emphasize with this community of educators?

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza:
Yeah. The first thought I had when thinking about coalition and solidarity is that it feels like failing a lot. It feels like trying and failing a lot. I think if we are teaching ethnic studies as true to history, it is naming that story of failing and trying a lot. Coalition and solidarity is not a cut-and-dry and easy business. It's messy work. It's messy work to name and locate yourself in relationship to others, which again, comes back to this vulnerability and the grief of that. It looks like I am seeing folks here say talking about vulnerability, strength, trust, and respect and I think that's so necessary when naming how coalition and solidarity happens, because it's, again, contextual. It's naming where you are, what power you do have in order to reach for each other. On the other hand, I also think it looks like and feels like a posture of reaching and a posture of openness, which is not always the default in the classroom.

So thinking about myself being in this co-curricular space, so the Multicultural Community Center, it's a good practice ground, and so hopefully spaces like this can be allies. I don't know what your campuses all look like, but to think about the co-curricular and interstitial and extracurricular spaces as good practice points for us to be in the posture of reaching towards one another and the posture of openness, so that that might seep into the classroom and be mutually informative and mutually constitutive of a practice together of trying what that looks like. I see this point. It appears it looks like new friendships in and out of the class, and I think that that's vital, because the Ethnic Studies classroom asks so much of folks to the personal, and so fostering relationships. It's all relational to me, so that's what it looks like as well, is thinking about the relational.

Julie Yick Wong Koppel:
Yeah. Thank you. As I was thinking about this question, again, I'd love to be in conversation with all of y'all, because I'm sure there's so many insights that many of you have from your own teaching practices. As I was thinking about this question, I was reflecting on how we start the year, which again, is a lot of community circles in [inaudible 00:46:11], and having the students understand that or trying that, "Hey, you're my other me. We're trying to build a sense of family here." So partially, on a level that high school students and a 14-year-old is thinking about, "How do I show up for my friend or my classmate?" right?

Then, kind of zooming back historically, when Victoria and Jason were talking earlier about the testimonials and words of some of the original activists and founders and the SF state strike for Ethnic Studies, we open with as we're building community and inquiry into what does Ethnic Studies and where did it come from? And so, students are reading the primary sources and looping into what Mike and Jason were saying about positionality. I think I'm always reflecting on that too and trying to figure it out, but as a Chinese-Irish-American woman, who often presents as white or sometimes Latina, [Foreign Language 00:47:12], so everyone's like, "What?"

It's like, I am not the voice to represent every community, right? And none of us can represent every single community, so it's what are the Black students, the Black Student Union at SF State, bringing in their voices, the Japanese-American students, the Filipinos, the Latino-American Student Association? So, just trying to center those voices, and then creating space so that the students are learning about that solidarity as well, and so kind of big picture, always thinking about the context and also the pedagogy, the approach, in addition to the content, I think, is something really important.

Mike Espinoza:
Thank you. Yeah. For me, I love solidarity. I always tell my students, "If there's one thing you remember from this class, it's solidarity, right? Take that with you, internalize it, and use this in your practice, right? If you're in solidarity with the people of the world, you're doing something good." And so, I think for me, it feels like an answer sometimes to those difficult questions, particularly when you're talking about oppression and stuff. And it could get overwhelming.

Then, the student's like, "Whoa. What can we even do about this? This is massive. This is governments."

And then it's like, "Yeah, and let's look at this, right? Let's look at some history, and let's look at the way that those governments were absolutely afraid of the people, right?"
And so, for me, when I think about solidarity and coalition work, it's just tied directly to resistance work. It's tied directly to liberation. For me, those go hand in hand. For me, I think, ultimately, it shows up in examples. This is where a lot of the history comes in, both historically and modern-day people movements, and then we get them to practice it. So kind of similar to what your space is, is like, how can we practice it in our space here? And so, still figuring that out a little bit, like how to do that with periods and bell schedules, and I try not to give too much homework and stuff, so you know what I mean? So still try to figure out the timing piece, but ultimately that's how I view solidarity in my class.

Jason Munoz:
All right. I do have one last question that I wanted to pose to our panel, but I do want to share also that once we've kind gone through, I want to make sure that there's space for all of you who are joining us today to ask questions of our panel as well. So if there's a question that's bubbling up for you or just something that you want to make sure that you want to give voice to, keep that one close because we'd love to hear from you as well. But the last thing that I wanted to present in this structure of these four essential elements of an ethnic studies course that we were able to name, and we got some feedback from our educators, was a question around explicit connections to community.

What do those look like and feel like in high school ethnic studies classrooms to make explicit connections to community? And once again, here's some of the feedback that our educators in that space last year gave. So again, super curious to know what you, in this convening here, think about this as well. But to the structure that we have going on right now, I'd love for them to take a second to sit with those responses and maybe respond to them or respond with your own ideas. Once again, Antmen, thank you so much for being my lead off person. If you need a second to sit with that, I'll buy you some time by stalling you out for another five, four, three. All right, let's go. Let's turn to you.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza:
Yeah. I think this is a great question. In part why I'm hesitating to answer is, I don't know. I mean, I can speak to, when I think about my experience of the high school classroom, granted this was a short while ago, but we weren't doing ethnic studies in Chula Vista. We weren't doing this, and so when I think about this question of feeling like an explicit connection to community, I think so much of my educational experience, up until this point, was to sever myself from the home life that I had and to be a particular person to perform academic success, in particular because the programs I had in my high school geared towards students of color were all around academic success towards upper mobility and class ascension. For people like me who come from immigrant and families, the idea was it's pipelining work.

So it's thinking about that, and so I think about this explicit connection to community. I think about what we do now. I mean, partially, I think my sitting on this panel is a manifestation of that question, of the explicit connection to community that Victoria and Jason, and imagining this panel of how do we think about curriculum, thought about co-curricular spaces on campus that need to exist for the student to feel like a whole person, and I guess this is what I'm building up to, is that there's this explicit effort, and it feels like the students are invited to be whole people as opposed to the school self that they might be performing and masking as all day, the invitation to be the whole person of themselves.

Julie Yick Wong Koppel:
Yeah, thank you. I really love exploring this theme and this question. Well, actually not just before the panel, but toward the end of last year, which was our first year of having ethnic studies in our district, and then throughout our process, we're always really interested in student voice, student feedback, and how we're doing. And so, since our students are not here right now, I just wanted to bring in a couple of their reflections that I think speak to this. I had a student write, "Emotionally, some of these topics make me upset to learn about, but they're essential for changing our actions, and they help me to try to better our community," so I just really loved that. I think of this, the community in the classroom, the community in the school, and then beyond, and our families and community partners.

One of the ways that we also tried to build this in is through oral histories, as many of you have mentioned, and so really just building on the creativity and the brilliance of our families. So with our oral histories, it was so cool just to see the students sitting in circles and sharing some of their family stories. They had carried out these interviews with a sister or an elder, and students like, "Wait. Can I have another week? I want to talk to my grandma.

She's in South Korea right now," and it was so sweet. Then, in the students afterward, they shared how much they enjoyed that process of hearing from others, and also having that opportunity to really engage in that kind of dialogue with family and community. And so, there was one other quote I just wanted to share where a student wrote, "Learning about my ethnic group inspires me to be stronger and better because of the contributions and persistence they put in." I really loved it, so with that, I'll pass it on to Mike.

Mike Espinoza:
Thank you. Thank you for bringing in your students. I mean, I think for me, logistically speaking, this is probably the most difficult one. Again, with those previous barriers with time, and some students only have that time in class. That's all they have, but there's a lot of ways. So I say that because, as educators, sometimes we have to redefine how we engage with the community. So oral histories are a great way to do that. This year I tried, for the first time actually, doing a WIPAR project. It was tough. It was really, really hard, and I think it was hard because it was so messy. More importantly, I think something that comes up, that could come up when you're making these explicit connections to community for students, is that they're not just buying into it. This is important to them, and yet it feels like, "Man, what we're doing is not enough," right?

And so, that definitely came up with a student in particular I'm thinking about right now, came to me after school and was like, "You're saying that we're going to end this in a month, and that's just not enough time, and I feel like it's not really making an impact. What's the point?"

I was kind of stumped a little bit, because I'm like, "But there is. I know there's impact that I know we're doing this for a reason," but I could tell she was really upset.

And so, just acknowledging the feelings, and also trying to bring it back to what Antmen said earlier, is that ambiguity, coming back to reminding her or reminding our students that this is ongoing work. This is work that we're going to continue. Hopefully we continue beyond this, right? And so, I don't think that was very satisfying for her in the moment, but she understood what I was saying, right? And so, I think that's an important, also, thing to bring in, is that if you do have them working in community work and there's a hard deadline and stuff, just being very explicit about the intentions behind it and what the goal is, right?

And so, what is the actual goal?

And so, might've been not as clear as I could have been, in terms of our goal is really to just kind of practice doing this work, so hopefully you continue doing this in your life, right? But yeah, we're not trying to solve X, right? It's not going to happen, realistically, and so that is something that came up for me here. But in terms of how it feels, I do feel like this is the point of ethnic studies, right? This is literally, why are we even doing this? Why are even learning about any of this? It's so that we can transform our communities, right? And so I think that this is important, and that's probably why it's so hard. That's probably why structurally, institutionally, it's so difficult to engage in this kind of work realistically with our students, because it is so hard. I think that it does feel good though, and the students ultimately come around, and they do understand this, actually, was really good work, especially when no one else on campus is doing this work. Yeah.

Victoria Robinson:
We often talk about ethnic studies as a love story. Here's the love. Let's appreciate the love. That's great. So we also always say that it's always a good time for ethnic studies, but right now it's a really good time for ethnic studies. So let's take some questions, comments.

Speaker 4:
Thank you. This was actually for you, because I'm [inaudible 00:58:47] faculty advisor in BTEP's teacher education program. I also teach the Foundation of Ethnic Studies course that the whole cohort kind of takes, but it's so fast. It's like four weeks, and it's two days a week for two hours, trying to fit in all this ethnic studies pedagogy for all different teachers at all these different levels. So I wanted to know, in coaching teachers and trying to just get them to develop that lens and that pedagogy, what's been the biggest challenge for you in coaching teachers as a TOSA, and then just any advice just to more intentionally bring that into some of my coaching and advising to really hold them to that?

Victoria Robinson:
I just want to say, because we've only got about five minutes, and we will have lunch together outside, could you just put your hand up if you also have a question, and then we can gather them so that everybody can hear them?

Speaker 9:
Do you want me to ask you?

Victoria Robinson:
Do you want to hold response for a second? I think if we gather everybody's questions, because we've only got five minutes.

Speaker 9:
Okay. Hi. I am a university professor at a state university in New York, and my question is, I'm wondering if you consider the future, and I'm sure you do, but I'm wondering what ways you might consider the future in ethnic studies. I'm teaching in DEI literature, and I'm teaching about futurism and futuristic literature, and I'm wondering ways to incorporate some more of this into that course with considering the future. How do we carry some of this stuff forward that we're learning for transformative change?

Victoria Robinson:
Great question. Thank you. We have some resources at Berkeley that could directly address that. Let's chat after. Other questions?

Speaker 10:
Hi. I just wanted to briefly say that I think it's important, coming from the panel we just had, to name that Palestine and Arab American studies is a really essential part of ethnic studies, and I teach at Berkeley High School. In trying to teach that, we've been getting a lot of pressure to essentially teach multicultural studies instead of ethnic studies. Long story short, respect to multicultural studies, but I've been taught by my elders in ethnic studies, I know I'm white, but I'm married into an ethnic studies family of professors of ethnic studies, that there's a distinct difference between ethnic studies and multicultural studies. I wondered if you could speak to that.

Chris De La Cruz:
My name is Chris De La Cruz. Very briefly, I'm really interested in the community aspect, as well as even the healing aspect. I'm very privileged and fortunate to be among mostly educators here. I'm a little bit of an outlier. I'm a community organizer and director, actually, who organizes faith institutions and youth from a liberationist standpoint, and particularly around mental health, and I'm just really curious what you see the role of outside community groups, such as faith institutions that could be helpful in ethnic studies and in the school? Yeah.

Victoria Robinson:
Any other questions? Let's take one last question, and then we'll have a couple of minutes to respond, and then we can follow up with lunchtime discussions.

Speaker 12:
Another question.

Victoria Robinson:
Yeah, two questions.

Speaker 13:
Thank you. My question is maybe a two prong question. What advice do you have to the states, counties, educators that reside in spaces that are not Berkeley, that are in predominantly white spaces, that are in spaces that are facing more pointed backlash, and connected to that, what is the potential for solidarity amongst all ethnic studies teachers to build together and to not feel siloed?

Speaker 12:
Thank you very much. Yeah. I teach in a majority white district with all white administrators who want to check a box, and this has been something I've been passionate about for decades now, and I'm ready, and how do I get my admin on board or go around them to do this correctly?

Jason Munoz:
I want to give you all a round of applause, and thank you for the audience. Thank you for being here. Thank you for our panel, and we appreciate you're doing all the fantastic work that you're doing, and continue on.

Outro:
And that concludes this episode of our special series of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute. For more episodes from this series featuring discussions from our Othering & Belonging conference in April, visit our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/who belongs. Thank you for listening.