Hispanic Dropout Project, 1997

A Curriculum Discourse for
Achieving Equity: Implications for Teachers When Engaged with
Latina and Latino Students (1)
Rudolfo Chávez Chávez
New Mexico State University
© Copyright

Prepared for the Hispanic Dropout Project
January, 1997

"No pedagogy that is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as
unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors"
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (1993a).
 

"'What do we need to do?' an elder asked. ... 'We must learn anew to trust the power within ourselves,' Jalamanta replied. 'Each one of us reflects the mystery of the universe. Each of us has a consciousness that partakes in the soul of the universe. When we understand this and see the same power in everyone, we learn to trust ourselves and others. That trust is the love we share with humanity. The poor man and the king, the poet and the materialist, all have a purpose in life. Our purpose in life is to arrive at new levels of awareness and clarity, and that clarity that we create in the soul becomes part of the consciousness of the universe'"
Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, Rudolfo Anaya (1996).

Introduction

Both of the selected passages capture what I consider to be pivotal to a discussion on constructing a curriculum discourse for Latina/o(2) students. That is, the need for authenticity from within the community that values, respects, and dignifies the self by trusting the self for the good of self and others. The constructing of a curriculum discourse for achieving equity rests on several interrelated and indeterminate conceptual visions: One, endeavor to construct curriculum that provides a discourse for a democratic and liberating pedagogy for Latino/a students and that captures possibility and hope; two, reinvigorate the curricular terrain with community, group, and personal historicity; three, recast thinking, attitudes, and actions that will exude success for Latina/o students; four, image curriculum as a cosmological and spiritual endeavor that germinates from the heart and soul of the teacher an intrinsic and pragmatic desire to engage learners in the process of learning--academically, socially, personally, and otherwise; and five, comprehend that curriculum and pedagogy are more than subject matter, lesson plans, a book, guide, or a list of things to cover. Constructing curriculum for achieving equity is an attitude that resonates from a longing to have all students think and do for themselves and others in compassionate ways rooted in respect, dignity, and high expectations.

Constructing curriculum for equity is grounded in a commitment to and for all learners (not just those with whom we feel comfortable) who have the right and privilege to an education that will provide unlimited avenues for the construction of their adulthood and a purposeful life. The following curricular constructs are discussed to provide a metaphoric architecture for teachers of Latina/o students to help those teachers to realize new ways of being, knowing, and acting morally and ethically for the betterment of themselves and others.

A liberatory curriculum discourse should permeate the practice of and for a Latina/o education. Axiomatic to this chapter is that there can be no single set of curriculum discourses to govern how teaching and learning should transpire every day. However, there are strong tenets about what schools should be about, what schools should teach, to what ends, and for what reasons (Eisner, 1992). The curricular constructs of "to be," "to know," and "to know how to do the right thing" are discussed in this chapter. These constructs contain overarching qualities that transcend and contextualize experience for teachers who are genuinely committed to the educational welfare and success of all students, and of Latina/o youth in particular.

In my framework, "to be" suggests the teacher's self-authentication that embodies reflective and reflexive thought and action based on one's sociocultural context. That is, the teacher-as-learner is a sociocultural entity with a unique historicity. The teacher-as-learner learns to re-value and reclaim her/his gender, race, ethnicity, and class with all the contradictions that will result, while simultaneously struggling with valuing not only the Other but also the Self in a new context of the "We" (see Rorty, 1989). "To know" is the generation of knowledge and the re-appropriation of existing knowledge that has been contextually critiqued. In turn, this transformative knowledge serves to engage all learners in the teaching and learning enterprise. "To know how to do the right thing" requires moral and ethical imperatives that encourage teachers to question our seemingly benevolent actions toward children in their name and in the name of education--for whose purpose? who will benefit? and why? These curricular constructs are orchestrated within the perpetual evidence of racism, sexism, classism, as well as other acts of violence and banal disrespect towards Latina/o students.

Presently, the education of Latina/o students is dismal. It has improved somewhat over the past decades, but the improvement has been uneven at best and rudderless at worse. Latino/a education can be reclaimed if we are serious and committed to equitable education and if we dare to do right by and for students. To reclaim Latina/o education will require teachers and teacher education institutions to rethink the location of Latino/a students within the larger educational enterprise of schooling.

In the literature and in the popular culture, politically correct symbols have anesthetized how we think about concepts pivotal to an equitable education in a diverse and pluralistic society. A critical vigilance by educators is paramount. How educators symbolize, deconstruct, and reconstruct the language of diversity and plurality is central to this paper, to curriculum discourse, and to the teaching and learning enterprise. Students' language, culture, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and exceptionality backgrounds matter in schools nationwide every day. Students interact with and engage one another in a variety of ways. Students engage school personnel -- especially teachers -- for academic purposes, talk to them at times socially, and many times, create significant and consequential one-on-one conversations. Characteristic to schooling is the knowledge that learners bring with them an array of experiences that many times authenticate their daily experiences and provide a contextual safety net for their learning. Moreover, schools and their environments are agencies of socialization; they do much more than engage learners academically. Besides academic learning, the school environment advances an array of sociocultural interactions that are implicit, explicit, tacit, and overt (Giroux & Purpel, 1983). The multiple learning matrices that unfold create the contextual learning environments within schools that are simultaneously academic, social, personal, interpersonal, and more.

Latina/o students are very much part of the political, cultural, and social inequalities that are endemic to today's schooling. Because of this location, the curricular constructs permeate the ethno-cultural; linguistic and dialectical experiences; community, group, and personal historicities; socioclass; and ethical manifestations that are contextually centered in the Latino/a experience. In the midst of curriculum reconstruction, reminding educators of past and present curriculum markers that have served to advance the transformative education of Latina/o students is momentous. When linguistic, cultural, and contextual experiences and realities are pedagogically actualized within a curriculum discourse that embraces and respects diversity and plurality, Latino/a students will be successful.

Constructing a Curriculum Discourse: "To Be"

The obligation for teachers and teacher educators in American schools is to responsibly examine society in its diverse and pluralistic contexts and to further examine how and whom we educate and why. That responsibility is key for an equitable education of and for Latino/a students. An equitable curricular discourse contests how we, as teachers and teacher educators, have ideologically constructed the Other within a monolithic fabrication that is monocultural, monolingual, and xenophobic rather than within a multicultural construct that respects and dignifies diversity and pluralism. The curricular construct "to be" informs the theory of agency by providing intersubjectivity, community, and solidarity (Best & Kellner, 1991). It is a notion of self that serves as a project useful to creative subjectivity for accomplishing a process of self-creation that can not be taken for granted (Sartre, 1956). "Yet [such a premise] must be mediated with theories of intersubjectivity which stress the ways that the subject [that is, the person] is a social construct and the ways that sociality can constrict or enable individual subjectivity" (Best & Kellner, 1991, p. 283, emphasis added). Through the years, I have seen how many teachers and teacher education institutions, consciously or unconsciously, force culturally or ethnically distinct students to be "like everybody else;"(3) that is, Latina/o students' individual identities (i.e., their subjectivities) are constricted, misjudged, and recast by those in power. "The real question that we must answer," responds Delpit (1995) "is [w]hat happens when the power to define oneself, to determine the self one should be, lies outside of the self or outside of one's referent community?" (p.37, emphasis added). So has been the case: Latina/o students have many times been defined and determined by those outside the community and in power. Teachers must ponder what Delpit has poignantly and insightfully addressed:

The curricular construct "to be" is a contestational force to the status quo that challenges the understanding of the self, as teachers and teacher educators, and understanding of the greater Other--that is, of Latina/o students and all students that are ethnically and culturally distinct. We may best add substance to the construct "to be" by validating and valuing the many stories that Latino/a students have. Dyson and Genishi (1994) contend that stories create intersubjective connections to the Other.

Renato Rosaldo (1993) speaks to the epistemological significance of story---that is, to the deep and sincere knowledge found when story is constructed and transmitted: "Stories often shape, rather then simply reflect, human conduct....stories shape action because they embody compelling motives, strong feelings, vague aspirations, clear intentions or well-defined goals" (p. 129). This could best be described as the process of self-creation mediated via the intersubjectivity of the experience--liberatory and multi-perspectival.

The question that must be consistently and ethically raised by the teacher is, "What within this entity before me deserves an ethical response? How do I learn to understand her/him?" To contextualize these questions, let me share with the reader what happens when the Other and her/his voice, her/his experiences are at best trivialized and at worse held to white middle class standards. The following narrative is taken from a much longer and involved story by Luis J. Rodríguez (1993). His story serves to place an unmasked face with feelings, hopes, desires, and sorrows--on what could easily remain faceless and masked, and just as easily remain as "they," "those people," and "outside" of us--that is, not within our everyday experience but serving only as an exercise to simultaneously intellectualize and externalize the Latina/o educational condition. He writes:

Rodríguez' story is a disheartening metatragedy of what many Latina/o students experience today. The "to be" discourse entails the realization that educating Latina/o students is political and will be ideological by the curricular constructs that are emphasized and the pedagogical practices that transpire (Freire, 1993b).

A great number of Latino/a students suffer under the patronage of public education. García's (1995) demographic synthesis reveals the dispossession and subtle contempt for human dignity that underlie the stark realities provided from inattention: 40% of Latinos/as leave school prior to graduation, with 40% of the dropouts leaving by 10th grade; 35% of Latina/o students are held back at least one grade; 47% of Latino/a students are overaged by grade 12; 70% of Latina/o students attend segregated schools, an increase of 56% from 1956; lastly, Latino/a students are "significantly below national norms on academic achievement tests of reading, math, science, social science, and writing at grades 3, 7, and 11, generally averaging one to two grade levels below the norm. At grade 11, [Latinos/as] average a grade 8 achievement level on tests" (García, 1995, p. 374). The curricular implications are immense and are part of the construct "to be."

"To be" also encompasses the sobering realization that subordinating metanarratives have been legitimated for and about Latino/a students. These narratives continue to mystify and subjugate Latinas/os into stereotypic, unidimensional understandings. True to form, the "dropout" enigma is a metanarrative that totalizes, demonizes, and de-legitimizes (Lyotard, 1979/1993) the cultural and linguistic capital Latino/a youth bring to the teaching and learning enterprise (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985; Mehan, 1996). The devaluing of our Latina/o youth has more recently begun to be mystified with a label whose roots lie in the psycho-medical discourse of deviance and that, to this day, continues to pervade the polemics of public policy (Mehan, 1996). Under the auspices of "students at risk," the so-called Latino/a "at risk" or "dropout" labels have legitimized the "problem" to rest within Latina/o youth (Astin, 1982; ASPIRA, 1983). Even though "dropout" is familiar to the education community, in particular, and the at-large community, in general, the term "dropout" semantically places the blame on the victim (Chávez Chávez, Belkin, Hornback, & Adams, 1991; Ryan, 1971).

Dropout has been challenged on this point by many. Bahruth (1994) for example, coined the label "squeezed out" to place responsibility on the systems that victimize whether intentionally or unintentionally. "At risk" also has similar roots. Mehan (1996) contends that

The mere framing of the discourse as "at risk" leads to deflecting the injustices perpetuated and institutionalized by those in power. This continues to lay blame onto those Latina/o students, their families, and their communities by implicating their lack of "cultural and moral resources for advancement" (Mehan, 1996). Said another way, the "at risk" discourse continues to be cast within the realm of deficiency theories that have so promulgated everyday life in general and the sociological literature in particular (Barrera, 1979).

There are many untold stories by Chicanos, Puerto Riqueños, Mejicanos, Mexican Americans, Dominicanos, Salvadoreños, Hondureños, Cubanos, Nicas, New Yoricans, and South Americans from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego. These stories are like Rodríguez' Vida Loca--his crazy life. There are many stories of triumph, also of dismay, of heartbreak, of experiences that happen--the happenings of real life. Rodríguez' story reveals the pain and humiliation of growing up poor in one of the largest urban centers in one of the richest nations in the world. His story encapsulates an all-consuming sadness that arises from loss of hope, from founding power in violence, and from the delusion of freedom found in alcohol and drugs. His story captures vivid images of schools--and the teachers that work within them. Such images show what schools represent to those with historical privilege by negating the Other, those who have historically been subordinated. In other words those Mexicans who do not understand English, who are poor, who--according to the status quo--don't want to learn.

Triumphantly and against all odds, Rodríguez graduated from high school and became a successful yet struggling writer after winning the Quinto Sol literary contest. The 1993 Carl Sandbury prize winner for nonfiction, Rodríguez' story vividly captures the cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic genocide he experienced in the streets and in classrooms. His story illustrates the internalizing of everything pathological, of everything "less," and of demeaning symbols that would plague him and his many friends with street names like Cha Cha, Chicharrón, Chente. Some--too many--died young; others leashed themselves to the prison life.

In the everyday, teachers' personal pedagogical practice is crucial. A teacher's personality, preferences, capacities, judgment, and values are always on display (Ayers, 1995). The curricular practices of the school and how it accepts or rejects the Other should not undermine but embrace Latinas/os and their notions of themselves. There are nuances to be mastered, including the ethnic/racial, social, educational history, and historicity of Latinos/Latinas (Chicanos/Mexican Americans/Mexicans, Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans, Salvadordeños, etc.) and individual students' historicities (biographies, stories both fiction and nonfiction) within these ethnic groups. Additionally, the teacher must reinvent her/himself and learn to "work from within" (Pinar, 1994) by comprehending the magnitude of her/his subjectivities (personal, contextual, cultural, gender, class, familial, all coupled within a historicity that embraces diversity and plurality) and how such subjectivities weave themselves into the creation of who s/he is today.

"To be" resonates with multiple perspectives. Teachers learn to understand themselves within the dynamics of diversity and plurality. "To be" impacts the pedagogical texture by engaging the learner with the personal and the contextual. Once teachers comprehend the complexity of their students and the historical context each student brings, teaching and learning become mutually inclusive and exclusively mutual. "To be" begins as an inner struggle (Anzaldúa, 1987) that becomes manifest when Latino/a students and teachers alike participate in the mutual struggle for equity and social justice. The "to be" discourse requires dignity and respect of the self as well as dignity and respect of the "Other." The inner changes that teachers make and bring into the learning process affects them and their students alike.

Constructing a Curriculum Discourse: "To Know"

Adding to the curriculum discourse that I propose, "to know" challenges both the Latina/o students and teachers. The discourse "to know" reconfigures a world view and envisions teaching and learning through diverse and disparate lenses of life's indeterminate knowledge paths. "To know" spiritually nourishes diversity and the aesthetic qualities that manifest when language and culture are celebrated. "To know" captures the academic complexity of autobiography and how individual stories propel the learning process into multiple perspectives and substantive inquiry, into the social construction of intuition, and the resulting eclecticism of pedagogical practice that just may capture the mystery of learning (see Slattery, 1995). "To know" requires a commitment to uncover the oppressive relationships learned over time and, because of time, considered normal.

Reality--as much as we would like to believe the contrary--is not a black and white encounter; 'gray' is clichéishly apropos. Pedagogical practice is not always a yes/no response but more an 'it depends' response steeped in the complexities of the learning context, the dynamics of the situation, and the cultural and linguistic signifiers learners bring to the context. It has been tempting, Lincoln and Guba (1985) admit, to neatly divide the world into dualisms that provide neat dichotomies such as form-substance, medium-message, induction-deduction, and mind-body. Lincoln and Guba convincingly argue such dualisms disappear on scrutiny:

As Lincoln and Guba state, the "knower and known are inseparable" (p. 94). In this spirit, the curricular construct "to know" requires a tacit understanding that curriculum is a dynamic event that is socially constructed by teacher and student. It is not an 'us against them' configuration. Curriculum is more than content, guidelines found within policy handbooks, or a teacher-learner dichotomy where the teacher, as an institutionalized power holder, acts upon the learner. The construct "to know" cannot be addressed using a technical approach to knowledge construction that simply asks "how to" questions. The challenges for Latina/o education and the educational responses to those challenges require epistemologically careful, deliberate, and disciplined understandings that genuinely value Latino/a students' experiences--that is, their ways of life and multiple realities that are beyond dualistic simplicities, many times oppressive, and stereotypical.

In contrast, the current curricular discourse -- enacted by the factory model tradition of schooling -- has been that teachers are the holders of knowledge and power, while students are the receptacles to be filled at several well-defined points of entry (Cuban, 1990; Macedo, 1993). Luis Rodríguez' story once again helps us to understand how schools and the people that construct school environments force many students into dualistic contradictions, neglect, and destinies of second-class citizenship:

Though Rodriguez experienced the above 20 years ago, his story remains typical of the inequitable education experienced by Latino/a students who are "tracked." When Latina/o students are perceived via the paradigm that Rodríguez lived, the curricular discourse that justifies actions, beliefs, and lives (Rorty, 1989) embraces hierarchical notions of nature (e.g., dominant and subordinate structures) and it provides mechanical explanations and metaphors (such as the factory model school and tracking) to support inequitable practices. This is antithetical to the multidimensional realities found in a diverse and pluralistic society and classrooms. Consequently, the determinacy reflected by dualistic structures or mechanical metaphors creates a linear causality that assembles people, things, and experiences into a one-dimensional objective reality.

Those in power -- who are the inventors and gate keepers of such a hierarchical reality -- have maximized their strengths and minimized their weaknesses. They have created a standard whereby Latino/a students, Native American students, African American students, and others can be quickly judged as substandard. Consequently, such standards vocationalize, segregate, sort, "dumb-down" the curriculum, and defraud learners' authentic intelligence via the apparent legitimate use of psychometric tests, other forms of assessments like language tests, skills tests, and other gate-keeping apparatuses (see Apple, 1990; Barrera, 1979; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Donato, forthcoming; Foley, 1990; Gamoran, 1990; Gamoran & Berends, 1987; Gould, 1981; Gutiérrez, 1995; Meier & Stewart, 1991; Oakes, 1985; Oakes, Gamoran, & Page, 1992; Olneck, 1996; Rodríguez, 1996; Romo & Falbo, 1996; Walker, 1987).

Educational researchers have poignantly illustrated the insidiousness of tracking and ability grouping. "To know" entails multiple perspectives that operationalize the act of knowing into political terms and the creation of meaning into contextual terms for both students and teachers. For the education of Latina/o students, "to know" requires the teacher to rethink her/his role as teacher and her/his relationships with Latino/a students who more than likely will be tracked. Teachers play an indispensable part within the learning environment of the school. They engage and nurture student learning via a variety of social and personal situations. Instructional knowledge and processes (i.e., pedagogical practices) should be used by teachers to bring about student engagement in genuine learning opportunities. Inherent in this process is the teacher's ideology as reflected in the pedagogical practices that the teacher exemplifies. The desired pedagogical practices will most likely include her or his curricular understandings embedded and processually mastered within constructs of diversity, pluralism, integrated pedagogy, knowledge acquisition and learning, first and second language acquisition and learning, academic content, democratic understandings, social justice, and the array of newly found epistemologies that will catapult students into the new millennium of technology, multicomplex information systems, multicultural communications, and global collaboration and competition.

The curriculum construct "to know" authenticates the curriculum of place. Curricular place is the location of engagement for Latinos/as. Curricular place deconstructs historical inaccuracies, dominant monocultural grandstanding, and it reconstructs history critically and genuinely. Curricular place authenticates the everyday dynamics of familial and group culture and the use of the Spanish language (and its dialects) to promote a politics of identity that liberates. Curricular place contests power structures that have, historically, legitimated monocultural, monolingual realities by simultaneously delegitimating bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural realities. Such multiple realities will serve to promote self-understanding, self-transformation, and cultural renewal (see Kincheloe, Pinar, & Slattery, 1994).

Time and place are conceptually important to the curriculum construct "to know." When students drop out, it is a clear declaration that educational institutions are not legitimating the time and place of their student citizenry. In the curriculum construct "to know," meaning cannot -- should not -- be separated from the context of the knower; and the knower cannot be separated from the known. Of primary importance is the realization that present day school curricula are hierarchically organized bodies of knowledge (see Lincoln & Guba, 1985) that marginalize or disqualify epistemologies about women, working class students, and culturally, ethnically, and linguistically distinct students (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985).

The curricular construct "to know" asks of teachers, teacher educators, and teacher education institutions to understand the complexities of ethnic stereotypic markers. These markers are socially constructed to lead to low expectations; to result in over reliance on testing by school districts and universities; and to make unimportant teacher preparation in first and second language acquisition, bilingual education, and multicultural education. Overwhelmingly, working with and for Latino/a students will require of teachers a leap into the centrality of language and cultural diversity that Latino/a students and all students bring (see Quality Education for Minorities Project, 1990). Low expectations, over reliance on testing, and lack of academic preparation create attitudinal postures that lead to academic neglect. Such postures will marginalize Latina/o students who may eventually drop out. Moreover, such postures render silent students' sociocultural and linguistic capital (Chávez Chávez et al., 1991). These postures disregard Latino/a students' tacit understandings -- cultural and otherwise. They construct a curricular discourse that has functioned to reproduce educational and social inequalities by silencing linguistic and cultural difference (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Foley, 1990; Willis, 1977). These inequalities have, in their own turn, lead to the inevitable -- dropping out.

These attitudinal postures inform the curricular construct "to know" in substantive ways that simultaneously dovetail with the construct "to be." The desired pedagogical practices should interweave Latino/a students' life histories, make meaning through cultural representation of Latina/o culture, and communicate via the language and sociodialects Latino/a students bring. In essence, the Latina/o learner should be at the center of learning through a responsive pedagogy that promotes academic learning, social responsibility, and a proactive engagement by the politics of identity.

"To know" requires educational stakeholders to understand and cope with a tragic legacy that continues to undermine Latino/a students' cultural capital (Barrera, 1979; Donato, forthcoming; Sánchez, 1932, 1934, 1940; Gutiérrez, 1995; Haught, 1931). That legacy continues to image Latinos/as as deficient when positioned within educational settings manipulated by a white dominant perspective that promotes a white male Western European canon (Chávez Chávez, 1995; Hidalgo, Chávez Chávez, & Ramage, 1996; Nieto, 1996, especially chaps. 4, 10).

The discourse that envelops the curricular construct "to know" is more than knowing content, knowing how to manage children, or knowing how to teach a formula, a unit, a lesson, or a concept. Teachers must be more than reproducers of the various schooling processes such as sorting, selecting, transmitting, and disciplining. "To know" is a social construction that clarifies for each teacher the vocabulary of solidarity in and with the human condition (Rorty, 1989); in other words, knowledge is understood with its tacit ideological understandings and as socially constructed. When teachers operationalize an attitudinal posture of solidarity, the curricular construct "to know" incorporates political action and critically determines the practice of social justice. It is an interactive activity that intensively engages teachers and students alike. It is a construct where inquiry, the finding out of something, the making meaning of something creates the dynamic of learning within a context rooted in respect for and an ethical commitment to social justice for Latina/o students. Teachers then question which content gets taught? to whom? in favor of what? of whom? against what? against whom? and how does that content get to be taught (Freire, 1993)? For teachers, curricular action demands quality participation by Latino/a students, their parents, and other teachers, all within the contextual milieu of the community. These actions predicate, without essentializing, the curricular construct "to know." When social justice is enveloped within the curricular construct "to know," teachers and teacher education institutions alike will rethink the location of Latino/a students within the larger educational enterprise of schooling.
 

Constructing a Curriculum Discourse:
"To Know How to Do the Right Thing"

Apparent in the literature and in our Hispanic Dropout Project's interviews with students, their teachers, and various other personnel who work effectively with Latina/o students is that Latinos/as need to be respected for whom they are and for what they bring to school. Unquestionably, Latino/a students need to be connected socially, emotionally, and academically to their schools. Latina/o students must experience teachers and a school curriculum that accepts them for whom they are and encourages them to grow to whom they can become. My observations and conversations at the selected sites where Latino/a students were experiencing success indicated that most teachers profoundly understood their students and the curriculum discourse that served them. Teachers acknowledged Latina/o contextual authenticity to include language, culture, ethnicity, and gender as well as the processual experiences within individual, family, and community contexts. Finally, teachers and the schools that supported them were prepared to do right by their students by daring to love and care genuinely for their students, their historicities, and their ethnicities.(4) These pockets of hope and possibility are curricularly rich in "knowing how to do the right thing."

Sadly, in the literature and in the greater schooling universe, the contrary is the case. Teachers have been naive or ignorant of the various curricular constructs that have maintained the status quo. These include curricular practices that have perpetuated stereotyped notions about ethnically and racially distinct learners (Gay, 1985), and practices that have promoted and legitimized well-entrenched intolerance for student diversity and pluralism even though student populations today are and will continue to be linguistically and culturally diverse (Fuller, 1994). Within teacher education institutions, many teachers in training have nurtured a missionary racism and bigotry based on stereotypical benchmarks learned over time (Ahlquist, 1992; Tran, Young, & Di Lella, 1994). Still others have maintained a tacit ambivalence and harbored misrepresentations about race and culture when teaching and learning within a pluralistic and diverse society (Lauderdale & Deaton, 1993).

"To know how to do the right thing" means delegitimizing all the above practices, and more. These practices and tacit understandings, in the final analysis, have afflicted not only Latina/o learners but all learners--albeit differentially (Bartolomé, 1994; Reyes, 1992; King, 1991; Sleeter, 1993; Tatum, 1992).

"To know how to do the right thing" is a construct that questions whether "we" as a collective of committed stakeholders will find solidarity with all our fellow human beings. Rodríguez' narrative captures one's "imaginative identification" for teaching and learning in Latina/olandia(5) and for its complexity at so many levels. For those only interested in affirming their ethnic/racial or social class biases, perpetuating their immigrant and Latino/a stereotypes about "gang life," and feeling legitimized for their fear about gangsters about Latinas/os in general and Chicanos/as in particular, this story will certainly appease. Rodríguez' story is more than an appeasement. It is a slice of everyday life that many Latina/o students experience in the "everyday of schooling" without being in gangs or ever "doing" drugs.(6)

His narrative reveals at least three insights into the schools' efforts to tear down what was tacit and sacred to him (see Moss, 1995). First, his epistemology of the everyday -- his living knowledge -- was to be capriciously replaced with something that, according to the schools, would make him productive in society and happy with his station in life, even if that station was albeit poor and second-class. Rodríguez (1993) had allies who understood that the principal issue was "social justice." Among some was Maureen Murphy. She wrote Rodríguez a letter shortly after she ran and won a controversial campaign for school office that pressed for unity and justice:

Reflecting on Maureen Murphy's letter, Rodríguez (1993) writes,"[s]ome like Maureen understood that the foundation for the sinking levels of instruction for all students, for their own diminished rights, lay in the two-tiered educational system. As long as some students were deprived of a quality education, they all were" (p. 221).

Rodriguez' second insight revolves around efforts to pulverize his cultural and linguistic core -- that is, his "ethnicness." Nurtured through generations and seeped in his mother's Indian heritage and his father's "Mexicanness," his innermost self was being replaced with actual and symbolic acts of domination (see Bourdieu, 1994) that would breed dreams and actions of self-doubt:

The third act of violence into which Rodriguez' narrative provides insight concerns the consistent bombardment of his ontological self--who he was and continues "to be" as a Chicano. The schools and his teachers, in their unbending missionary desire to Americanize him, never realized that Rodríguez already was an American but that they were trying to remake him in the image of something he could never "be" -- an Anglo white male. If Chicanos cannot be remade into such an image, then:

"To know how to do the right thing" is the moral progress of making the "Other" "Us" rather than "They". It is embracing the moral imagination, to image other people's creations by making them deeply part of us (see Geertz, 1983; Rorty, 1989). Rorty argues that "detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation ([found] in, e.g., novels or ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious treatises, (are) the modern intellectual's principal contribution to moral progress" (p. 192). Rodríguez' autobiography is such a work. Through his work, he informs the greater "us" about pain and humiliation and, simultaneously, about hope and possibility--moral progress against enormous odds.

Rodríguez gives us a metaphorical window into what happens when schools and the teachers within such schools keep Latina/o students as "they." He addressed racial tension due to socioclass stratification, addressed the devastation of tracking and the marginalization of Chicanos/Chicanas because they were and will continue "to be" Latinos/as. What Rodríguez experienced is not just part of the Chicana/o or Latina/o experience but is an American experience that many of our fellow Americans live everyday. If we are to be persuaded, morally and politically "to know how to do the right thing," then let it be because Latina/o students are our fellow Americans; and insist that it is outrageous that Americans should live without hope (see Rorty, 1989).

To own the curricular construct "to know how do the right thing," teachers must first genuinely value all students in a pedagogy of praxis immersed in the contingencies of teaching and learning. It is in their everyday practices that teachers' sense of "we" will be extended to those previously thought of as 'they or them, or those people' (Rorty, 1989).

That American classrooms will continue to be multiculturally diverse and pluralistic is a given: 30% of the K-12 population consists of culturally, ethnically, and linguistically distinct students; Latinos/as represent well over 40% of the growth while Asians and Pacific Islanders have increased 116% (García, 1995). Cultural diversity is not the issue. The issue is whether a moral tenor will catapult ethnic, racial, linguistic, and cultural understandings from neutral, politically safe curricular constructs such as foods, fashions, festivals, and folklore -- that is, the four Fs of a neutral, pasteurized multicultural education. Needed is a moral tenor that will include the cultural and linguistic contexts of Latina/o students, including the pain and humiliation felt by 'us' not just by "they" or "them," or those "people." The needed moral tenor advocates a courage and an attitudinal posture by which people wildly different from ourselves are included in the diverse and pluralistic range of 'us' (Rorty, 1989).

Constructing the curriculum discourse "to know how to do the right thing" requires a sense of mission and an undeniable passion to want to do right by and for students. Although not apparent to the greater educational community, the road has a clear direction that documents what has been learned about educating Latino students within a backdrop that values culturally distinct communities by committed educators (see Ada, 1986/1991; Delpit, 1988/1991; García, 1995; Gutiérrez, 1995; Nieto, 1995). There is a rapidly growing, rich epistemology that summarily and critically documents successful curricular and pedagogical practices for Latino students (see for example Cummins, 1989; Darder, 1991; Díaz, Moll, & Mehan, 1986; García, 1995; Lucas, Henze, & Donato, 1990/1991; Nieto, 1995; Minami & Kenney, 1991; Romo & Falbo, 1996). Plainly stated, teachers and teacher education institutions should already know what they need "to know" in order "to know how to do the right thing" to advance the educational success for Latino/a students.

A recent study stands out for critically informing the "to know how to do the right thing" construct. Harriett Romo and Toni Falbo (1996) conducted a three-year study of Mexican origin students who were labeled "at risk" of dropping out by a school district. Four categories of data were collected: 1) survey questionnaires for parents and students (100 families), 2) in-depth, tape-recorded interviews at the beginning and end of the study, 3) annual follow-up telephone interviews, and 4) information from the school districts for each of the 100 families. Their book's chapter themes -- including student case studies -- were tracking; school policies; gang involvement and educational attainment; teen motherhood; immigrant and second-generation students; the GED process; bureaucracy experienced; and cultural boundaries, family resources, and parental actions.

Romo and Falbo (1996) found that the schools in their study were quick to shrug their responsibilities rather than develop a "to know how to do the right thing" curriculum discourse:

Romo and Falbo (1996) provide recommendations that, by their own account, are not original. When such recommendations have been instituted in the past, it has been piecemeal; consequently the recommendations have not been successful. Their "recommendations for change" are clustered in seven broad areas: putting the learning of students first, clarifying scholastic standards, preventing student failure, making participation in schoolwork rewarding, emphasizing hard work, making schools accessible, and creating clear pathways to good outcomes (Romo & Falbo, p. 219).

"To know how to do the right thing" does not require the insights of a rocket scientist. It does require, however, the determination of a rocket scientist to believe that a curriculum discourse immersed in a liberatory, social justice pedagogy for Latina/o learners is possible. Romo and Falbo (1996) affirmed that good teachers made the difference in whether Latino/a students experienced academic success or not. They found that all students and parents differentiated good teachers from poor ones. Good teachers bent over backwards to do the right thing. Good teachers had consistent high expectations with high standards. Good teachers would change instructional approaches to meet the needs of each student. Poor teachers simply did not try to help all students. Poor teachers taught the same way every year regardless of whether their approach was effective. Quick to blame parents' and students' deficiencies, poor teachers made no attempt to change their teaching.

Some of Romo and Falbo's (1996) specific recommendations are skill driven. This can be understood, since their research data were collected in Texas -- a state that is driven by a linear, one-dimensional, culturally and linguistically biased skills curriculum and test. Romo and Falbo's results and recommendations illustrated that caring, resourceful, well-educated teachers understand that all students should be held to high standards and expectations, and that with such teachers, academic success and educational equity for Latinas/os will be a matter of course.

There are communities and schools that are immersed in learning "to know how to do the right thing." The HDP newsletters and the accompanying chapters in this volume give an excellent representation of such communities, schools, and programs. During my visit to schools and community sites in Texas, California, Florida, New York, and New Mexico, several qualities surfaced that characterize how "to know how to do the right thing" for the education of Latina/o students. First, an overall sense of high quality and high expectations that all students would achieve was a constant and consensual standard. Second, an ethic of authentic caring was evident among the greater community, teachers, administrators, and among and within students. Third, there were meaningful adult/student connections (social, academic, interpersonal and intrapersonal, nonacademic) before school, during school, and after school, constructed to make academic transitions relevant to the everyday. Fourth, bilingual education, English as a second language, and culturally rich curricula were nonissues. Fifth, a long-term consistent struggle to improve the educational experience of students was most evident. And sixth, all sites zealously maintained each learner's integrity and served each learner's needs and desires, 'one at a time.'

As a Chicano academic, an eighth-generation Nuevo Mejicano, second generation American,(7) and a member of the Hispanic Dropout Project, I have agonized over Rodríguez' courageous "Vida Loca." His narrative has opened old wounds. Like Rodríguez, many Chicanos have received over generations a white supremacist curriculum under the trust of a "good education" (Eisner, 1992; Eagleton, 1991). Contradictions inevitably have resulted. For example, my education taught me that to know and speak two languages was truly a deficit.(8) I was to go to school to learn English and forget Spanish. I almost did. English was the language and to speak English with a Spanish accent was a sign of ignorance--as if only good thoughts happen in non-accented English. I can count on one hand the teachers that respected and valued me as an ethnically distinct human being. The American history I learned in school was superficial at best.(9) As clichés go, I learned that Cristobal Colón discovered America and that George Washington was the father of my country. Never mind that my ancestral family was already in New Mexico by the time George Washington crossed the Delaware(10) and that some of the greatest ancient civilizations had reached their human apogees in Mexico and Central and South America centuries before Columbus stumbled upon the Caribbean Islands. My formal education was, no less, a curriculum discourse that was part-and-parcel to a western traditionalist, nativist canon (see Cornbleth & Waugh, 1995).

Like many, I have kept my Spanish/New Mexican/Chicano language and Chicano/New Mexican/Mexican culture against enormous odds. I have struggled with learning and nurturing contextually rich idioms, expressions, and idiomatically and culturally appropriate professional and personal language that are part of Latino/alandia and Chicana/olandia and will continue to be "our" American experience. I guess you could consider this the education of Rudolfo Chávez Chávez.(11) The Chicano, New Mexican, and Mexican history--the silenced American history that I finally did learn and the Spanish language that I now covet -- was almost lost to the American dream of white supremacy. My language and cultural education have not been because of my schooling but in spite of it. The curriculum construct, "to know how to do the right thing," is more than the employment of a rational consciousness to generate "moral obligation." It is having the imaginative identification with the details of others' lives, rather than a recognition of something antecedently shared. To care, to make connections with, and to identify with the Latino/a students that we serve requires moral imperative. Achieving educational equity requires no less.
 

Conclusions: A World View

Education for Latina/o students must be reconceptualized to include a postmodern perspective seeped in social justice. This chapter discusses three curricular constructs that provide such a world view for teachers and teacher-education institutions. It will require a revolutionary resolve to construct a curriculum discourse that is unique and inherent to the contextual (linguistic, ethnic, racial, cultural, gender, and otherwise) realities of Latino/a students. Simply put, the act of constructing a curriculum discourse is composed of "meanings" and "facts." The socially constructed examples and discussion provided throughout this chapter include and accept nonlinguistic things called 'meanings' which a curriculum discourse expresses. And, there are nonlinguistic things called 'facts' which a curriculum discourse represents. Therefore, the curricular constructs--"to be", "to know", and "to know how to do the right thing" -- cannot exist independently of the human mind; neither meanings or facts nor a curriculum discourse exist outside of us. "The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not ... The world on its own--unaided by the describing activities of human beings--cannot [exist]" (Rorty, 1989, p. 5).

It is our responsibility to redescribe, reinvent, and reconstruct a world view where the practice of educational equity as a matter of course is second nature. I have argued that the attitudinal posture of the teacher is crucial for educational equity to transpire. Kliebard (1992) forewarns us that it "is not simply one of who went to school and who did not, but the way in which the social machinery is constructed to differentiate access to certain forms of knowledge" (p. 158). Attitudinal, negatively biased (societal and educational) constraints have been institutionalized to create grave disparities in the past and today in the education of Latina/o youth (see Donato, forthcoming; Gutiérrez, 1995; Oakes, Gamoran, & Page, 1992; Olneck, 1996; Rodríguez, 1996; Romo & Falbo, 1996). It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the many intricacies and results that such disparities have rendered. Notwithstanding, such understandings are crucial in conceptualizing curricular constructs for teachers of Latino/a students and they are integral to the overall grounding of this chapter.

Proposed is a world view, constructed by 'us,' that reflects the complexity and nonlinearity of a diverse and pluralistic world--revolutionary in context and evolutionary in process. This world view illustrates the various connections that can be made between people, groups, situations, and circumstances that are by no means hierarchical but heterarchical in communicative diffusion. The proposed world view acknowledges the interplay of the information explosion with the interplay of people, their cultures, languages and contexts, and the synergetic inter-collaborations therein. It is indeterminate by nature and mutually causal by design rooted in the complexity of constructed social contingencies (see Rorty, 1989). Finally, the called-for world view understands and has faith in the regeneration of the human spirit to reinvent itself and see the world anew based on the power of perspective (see Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

The challenge posed by this paper is to practice a world view that authentically promotes a liberatory education for Latina/o students as well as all students. In that world view, teachers will engage Latino/a students in the teaching and learning enterprise exuding an ethic of caring and of respect. They will construct an implicit dignity as the foundation for Latina/o students' personal and academic success. Teachers will dare to understand and work with Latina/o students; and Latino/a students will dare to dismantle the many oppressive realities that they have become accustomed to and have many times accepted. This liberatory education will embrace curricular constructs that acknowledge and nurture multiplicity, plurality, and indeterminacy, replacing racism and linguicism with respect and dignity.(12)

In this paper, curriculum discourse was a convenient term to categorize, under a single conceptual label, an array of things we do with curricular symbols (see Eagleton, 1991). Teachers' construction of curricular discourse embodies diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism, and language acquisition; it is shorthand for an immense range of pedagogical practices all teachers must embrace and make second nature to their teaching repertoire. How these practices are personified with each teacher's students is crucial. Foundational is an inter- and intrapersonal ambiance that covets and advances equal and accessible education for all students who enter public schools.

As a critical pedagogist and teacher educator, my role and the curricular constructs generated are straight forward. I am morally committed to political action in the everyday as I make sense of my world by learning with my students as we deconstruct what has been taken for granted within the greater educational enterprise. The learners that I am engaged with must come to understand that they are cultural workers in a terrain where the stock in trade is power and the reproduction of privilege, and where reproducing the status quo without critique is primary while authentic learning is secondary.

Once myths are discovered and deconstructed, we begin to reconstruct and reconceptualize teaching and learning within a transformative paradigm that sees teaching and learning as truly a human endeavor of engagement. Teaching becomes a human endeavor that reconnects and embraces our ontogenetic desires to value authentically learners for who and what they are. Together, teachers and learners begin to create a passion for teaching and learning that is suffused with love and respect for one another, in undeniable context with the "We." In short, the learners I work with come to the realization that teachers are political activists who must be passionate about and for an enterprise that promotes social justice, democratic action, and mutual respect. On their own, my learners come to realize that their passion must be grounded on the authentic experience of their own transformations couched in terms of "consciousness," "ideas," and "materiality." The 'meanings' and 'facts' of these latter curriculum discourse formations are inherently social and practical (see Eagleton, 1991). Moreover, my learners come to realize that their conscious passions do not take root in neutrality, with an absence of integrity, or with ideas that have been anesthetized by neglect or lack of compassion. My beginning teachers' curricular transformations cannot be divorced from the social construction of teaching and learning with Latino/a students. For my teachers to experience a consciousness of "we," they must first see themselves through the eyes of all students that they will serve (see Eagleton, especially chap. 7).

As critical actors in their own worlds, teachers are intellectuals who must be grounded in making sense of the everyday as they work with learners to construct meaningful learning opportunities in a diverse and pluralistic world. They are researchers, not in the esoteric sense, but in the knowledge-finding sense. Teaching requires serious reading, critical dialog, self-critique, undying respect for oneself, and the "We." It requires a willingness to give oneself to a transformative learning process. How each teacher resolves to become a liberatory learner and social-justice educator in the teaching and learning enterprise is a decision that must include a genuine respect for the "We" and simultaneously affirm a multicultural reality. Anything less will continue to provide a "neutral" education that further solidifies the curricular status quo and perpetuates a mediocrity that already exists in far too many classrooms for too many Latina/o students today.

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1. I would like to acknowledge the initial readers of this piece for their invaluable assistance in making this piece more readable and focused: Christine Sleeter, María Torres-Guzman, and Walter Secada. Each colleague took a different slant as he or she struggled with me. I thank each of them for their insights and recommendations. Also, I was helped immensely by conversations held while at the University of Toledo as a Visiting Scholar; thanks to Bill Armaline, Helen Cook, Mark Kinney, Thomas López, Renée Martin, and Evelyn Reid. My time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was also most fruitful; my conversations with Carl Grant, Tom Popkewitz, and Walter Secada gave me the opportunity to "try out" some important ideas. Lastly, my thanks and gratitude to my colleagues within the Department of Curriculum and Instruction here at New Mexico State University, Jim O'Donnell, Marc Pruyn, and Christine Clark, for critique and support. I am solely responsible for this piece, its shortcomings and its contributions.

2. There are already too many stakeholders whose economic (coded class) and social identity (coded white) are wed to the term Hispanic. To a Chicano like myself, the term, Hispanic, represents only a Spanish/European legacy without honoring the historical attributes, geographical locations, linguistic, ethnic/racial, and economic/social class distinctions that embrace Latinoness. Hispanic, at worst, represents a pasteurization and homogenization of cultural entities that undermine historicities. Murguia (as cited in Nieto, 1995) contends that "[s]truggles over ethnic labels are not meaningless. Fundamentally, they are ideological in nature, attempts to define a group and to direct its future" (p. 8). I am affirmed with the term Chicano because it represents an political entity of liberation; it also represents geographic authenticity and ownership to a much larger struggle rooted in the Latino/a civil rights movement of the 60s and to the beginnings of my family in New Mexico and Mexico. For this paper, I will use the umbrella label of Latina/o because of its all-embracing qualities that represent the richness of peoples encompassed within the entire Western Hemisphere and the peoples of European decent (see Chávez Chávez & McLaren, 1996). The label Hispanic will only be used when in quotes.

3. See the works of Cummins, 1981; Díaz, Moll, & Mehan, 1986; García, 1995; Lucas, Henze, & Donato, 1990/1991; Nieto, 1995, 1996; Macedo, 1993, 1994; Minami & Kenney, 1991; Romo & Falbo, 1996; to name a few.

4. I thank Walter Secada for adding much clarity to this paragraph.

5. Latina/o "land": the Latina/o community at large; the space, spiritual and in-terrain where Latino communities prosper.

6. In the Hispanic Dropout Project's focus group conversations with students, parents, and community members, an overwhelming number of participants made us aware of the over crowded classrooms, of blatant disrespect to parents simply because the parents only knew Spanish or spoke English with an accent. Students at every site we visited spoke of boring classrooms where some teachers read the newspaper during class.

7. My mother, Leonila Chávez, was born in Chihuahua and imigrated to the United States when still a child and became a naturalized American citizen in her early 20s. My father, George R. Chávez, was born in the New Mexico territory before it become a state. Using this reference then, I am a first- or second-generation U.S. citizen even though my father's family has lived, worked, and died in New Mexico for at least eight generations; and, my mother's family was originally from New Mexico but migrated to Chihuahua (see Chávez, 1989).

8. See also the works of Barrera, 1979; Cortés, 1986; Cummins, 1981.

9. See Acuña, 1972; Zinn 1980.

10. See Fray Angelico Chávez's (1989) genealogical research on the Chávez clan.

11. There are "educations" contrary to the one I or Luiz Rodríguez received. Others such as Richard Rodríguez (1981) in Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodríguez, painfully, hesitantly at first, then with joy and hegemonic subservience accepts the ideological supremacy of a white European American tradition education. See also Linda Chávez's (no relation) book, Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (1991).

12. Disrespect and humiliation have many times been the case. See for example: Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Toward Liberation (1972); Arnoldo De León's They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (1983); Thomas F. Gossett's, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963); James M. Jones' Racism and Prejudice (1972); Ashley Montagu's Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942); Thomas Powell's The Persistence of Racism in America (1992); and, Ronald Takaki's Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (1979) to name only a few.

This paper was written for the Hispanic Dropout Project and was partially supported by funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education (Grant No. R-117D-40005). The opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the Department of Education and no official endorsement by the Department of Education should be inferred.