Academics and students from UCLA and beyond gathered for a symposium Thursday on immigrant youth, their education, and political and social activism.
The various presenters provided ideas and perspectives from how to improve inner-city immigrant education, to using oral history to engage students, to how students can use covert means to dissent.
This event, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, was organized by nine UCLA students in the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies who were Spencer Foundation Research and Training Grant Fellows.
The Spencer Foundation is the largest funder of education research in the United States, said Aimee Dorr, the dean of the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
The keynote speech discussed the ways by which immigrant high school students express dissent with government policies in the United States post-Sept. 11. The speaker, Sunaina Maira, professor of Asian American studies at UC Davis, studied the ways in which Southeast Asian and Muslim students in a New England high school responded to the patriotism and military actions following the terrorist attacks.
Maira said that instead of young people and students organizing political protests the way they did in the 1960s, which is regarded as the benchmark of political activism by some, these students express their opposition through what she calls “ambiguous dissent.” They do not band together to protest openly but make speeches to educate their peers on their differing views.
This more informal engagement with the political realm is dismissed by some scholars, leading people to believe that youth today are apathetic or indifferent to politics, Maira said.
The symposium then turned to the ways in which youths, especially immigrants, are more engaged in the school curriculum.
David Garcia, lecturer in Chicana and Chicano studies, developed the critical race theater as a means to provide counter-stories of mainstream history.
Critical race theater uses media such as poetry, monologues and plays to tell the stories of people of color.
In one of his Chicana/o studies classes, students are asked to interview people in their families and communities and use these oral histories to bring to light the histories of marginalized societies.
“History doesn’t have to be about people in power. History can be the hot-dog vendor, your neighbor,” Garcia said.
Two of Garcia’s students presented their works from the class, condensing the interviews into a short monologue about the experiences of these immigrants.
Aimee Lopez, one of the two student presenters, performed her Spanish monologue about a undocumented worker who sells hot dogs in Los Angeles.
Garcia said critical race theater allows scholars to be more engaged in their work and can be implemented in K-12 education as well.
The symposium also featured a presentation by Students Informing Now, or SIN, an organization from UC Santa Cruz comprised of AB 540 students, who qualify for in-state tuition at California universities regardless of their immigration status, as long as they meet certain education requirements.
Neidi Dominguez and Miriam Torres, both members of SIN, spoke about supporting other AB 540 students and educating high school students about available opportunities, such as certain scholarships.
SIN also aims to provides a chance for these students to engage in activism, such as immigration rights protests.
“(SIN provides) a safe space that facilitates personal transformation that lead to political transformation,” Dominguez said.
The final part of the panel presentations highlighted graduate student Benji Chang’s experience teaching at an inner-city elementary school in Los Angeles, and how his curriculum improved the performance of his students.
Chang said his class plan focused on fostering a sense of community in a diverse student body, valuing and engaging the parents and creating a strong school-home connection. He also tried to individualize the curriculum and incorporate popular culture such as hip-hop.
Every week, Chang sent bilingual letters home to parents to talk about their children’s progress.
In addition, Chang’s class focused on social justice, and the students participated in social activism such as anti-war rallies.
In his four years of teaching the same group of students from first to fourth grade, Chang said he saw the students earn high scores on standardized exams. But after they changed teachers and schools, their performance was mixed.
The decrease in academic performance by some students suggests that more work is needed to improve pedagogy and the education system, he said.