By Meg Stentz, Competency Collaborative Associate Director
What can CRSE look like in daily instruction? Where is CRSE in your list of priorities, with already demanding pacing calendars, and surges of Covid that drive up student and staff absences? Education feels like a game of beat the clock, and it’s all too easy to let the most important, but least mandated, pieces fall away. Here’s one example of centering the most important pieces of students’ lives – identity, power, community, while instilling the skills and criticality that will support young people in their lives.
Last month I was invited to a student performance at Brooklyn International High School (BIHS), a Competency Collaborative Living Lab school. BIHS, like all Internationals Network schools, serves recently arrived immigrants. Students at BIHS come from many countries, with varying levels of English and varied experience with attending school in their origin countries. Throughout their time at BIHS, they learn not only the entire high school curriculum, but the English language as well.
Student actors depict a teacher discriminating against an undocumented student in class.
As a member school in the Internationals Network, BIHS understands that traditional schooling was not designed to meet the needs of their students. They take seriously the task of meeting these young people where they are. The curriculum at BIHS is interdisciplinary and project-based. Students learn by doing – in many modalities, in every class.
The performance I was invited to was partway through a unit by awesome educators Shahzia & Sheila focusing on PIE: Power, Identity, Equity. Students performed a Theater of the Oppressed – a performance model created by Augusto Boal where actors do a brief scene, centered around oppression, and then members of the audience have the opportunity to tap-in as one of the characters and to perform the scene differently. The goal is to come to a different, powerful, equitable resolution. The scenes focused on immmigration, police brutality, gentrification, workers’ rights, and racism – often scenes involved threads of several of these issues, and most often the protagonist was undocumented.
As an audience member, not only was I tasked with brainstorming how the scene could go differently, and the option to bring that difference to life, but these savvy BIHS teachers asked audience members to take notes: What injustices did we see? What could the protagonist do differently? What connections do we have to the theme? Importantly, responses from the audience –students, teachers, community members – went to the group who performed the scene.
“Life of an Undocumented Immigrant
Jose and his family are planning to come to the US. After their arrival Jose and his wife Maria start to search for a house. Their daughter is trying to adapt to the American style since she knew English since she was in Mexico. The landlord enters their home and trouble begins. ”
“The Woes of Gentrification
A brother and sister are talking outside of the building where they live and run a coffee shop. They learn they are being pushed out because of the rent, and then they learn a Starbucks is moving next door.”
Our notes became part of the research for a paper they were writing on their PIE topic.
There’s so much to love about that simple move –
Of course, it keeps the students in the audience engaged. It asks them to do their own critical thinking, and problem solving. It ups the cognitive load in what could have been a passive activity.
Shifting the performance to the middle of the unit, rather than the end, makes this an assessment for learning, rather than of learning. The performance was always going to have the awesome benefit of being an authentic product for a real audience, but its placement in the unit transforms it into really meaningful active practice, real skill building. From a competency perspective, that’s brilliant.
My favorite way this changes the game, though? By making the audience’s notes an artifact for informing research papers, it posits community members and classmates as experts in their own lived experience. It democratizes knowledge, and reifies the expertise of those closest to the issues of the PIE unit. It places community experience side by side with other ways of knowing, and validates both.
Centering students’ knowing
What does it look like to center that idea – that students are the experts, that their knowledge matters – in every classroom? That’s the work of CRSE.
CRSE scholarship has different ways of talking about valuing students’ and families’ ways of knowing. It’s useful to me to pair the terms from the literature with the curricular example above from BIHS.
Student actors portray the fallout of discrimination: a student in distress.
Funds of knowledge. The idea behind funds of knowledge comes from Lev Vygotsky’s ideas about child development. He taught education the power of activating prior knowledge, positing that an alignment with students’ lives outside of school would support student learning. Of course, this has implications for minoritized learners. Luis Moll prompts educators to acknowledge and tap into the existing funds of knowledge for the students in their classrooms, particularly when there is a cultural mismatch between students and teacher or curriculum. Learn more about leveraging funds of knowledge here.
Community cultural wealth. Researchers steeped in whiteness have long overlooked the assets of minoritized communities, with research that focuses on disparities in wealth and narrowly defined cultural capital. Dr. Tara Yosso’s model of community cultural wealth provides a holistic look at the assets that families of color possess. She defines other forms of capital, beyond money, that include: aspirational capital, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, resistant capital, linguistic capital, and cultural capital. Students and families of color contribute to and draw upon each of these forms of capital in navigating their educational experiences. Learn more about each type of capital here.
Theater of the Oppressed powerfully taps into both students’ funds of knowledge, and the community cultural wealth of the audience. Students bring what they know about living as immigrants, living in neighborhoods that are gentrifying, into the classroom with them and use it to write and perform scenes about power, identity, and equity. At the same time, the audience’s community cultural wealth is valued when they’re called upon to lift up solutions to the problems of the protagonist. In the performances where audience members tapped in students flexed their navigational capital, refusing to open their doors to ICE without a warrant present. They leaned into familial capital, calling for help from family members rather than the police when faced with situations of abuse. They used resistant capital to stand up to parents and teachers who had narrow ideas of what DACA-protected immigrants could be.
Shahzia (left) & Sheila (right)
Gigantic thank you to the students and staff of Brooklyn International HS, for the warm welcome, for sharing so much of your brilliance with those around you, and for grounding all your work in a love for community. In particular, gratitude to Shahzia Pirani-Mellstrom and Sheila Aminmadani, the BIHS educators who facilitated this event. Shahzia and Sheila support team Be the Change, the senior class, at Brooklyn International HS. They each teach PIE (Power, Identity, Equity), a humanities class that combines English and Social Studies.
Explore the concepts of funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth in community at your school. NYU MetroCenter’s NYC Culturally Responsive Working Group offers this brilliant resource: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/ejroc/session-6-crse-and-relationships-families-and-communities. This comes from a 10-session resource for schools looking to grow their Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education practices. Explore the entire guide here.