Como una flor/like a flower, we bloom: Memories along the community college pathway

Previous studies on Mexican American students in community college have demonstrated a sense of resilience in completing their studies. However, such studies have been student-centric in advising that cultural capital be utilized in fostering student success. In this article, we advise the incorporation of pedagogical conocimientos as a tool for the professional development of faculty, staff and administrators in humanizing the community college experience. The findings in this article explore ways in which three students draw upon their memories in furthering their education. We analyze how students make sense of lived experiences and transmit them into their educational trajectory.

A Culturally Validated Model of Student Success Services and Academic and Curriculum Enhancements at a Hispanic-Serving Institution

Though college enrollment rates for Mexican-American students have increased over the past years, Mexican-Americans still have one of the lowest rates for degree completion. However, more work is recognizing the strengths of students of Mexican descent, particularly those related to culture such as familism, and calling for asset-based programs that validate the student to increase student retention and persistence. Programs infused with such an approach likely address aspects that improve performance amongst Mexican-American students; however, evidence-based assessment is limited. This paper will detail an asset-based program that uses a culturally validated model of student success services and academic and curriculum enhancements at a Hispanic-Serving Institution to increase overall Latinx student retention and persistence. The program infuses Validation Theory (Rendon, 1994) to address cultural strengths of students and validate their life experiences as first-time freshmen, by creating a culturally relevant curriculum, enhancing culturally relevant student support services, and promoting education equity. Students involved in this program report a high level of belongingness at the university as well as have higher pass rates in their culturally validated courses. Recommendations are discussed for implementation of such a comprehensive program at other institutions as well as implications for higher education.

Later-Generation Mexican-American Undergraduate Stages of Passage and the Development of a Transformational Impetus

Race and immigrant generation are among the most important factors that shape educational opportunities and outcomes in U.S. society. While sociological researchers point to downward mobility after the second generation among Mexican-Americans, there is limited empirical attention to the role that generational status may play in shaping post-secondary educational experiences and outcomes. Drawing on the under-utilized Undergraduate States of Passage Model advanced by Yosso (2006), this study qualitatively examines the experiences of later-generation Mexican-American students. Findings indicate that later-generation Mexican-American college students experienced unique challenges to building counter spaces with other Latinos on campus. Yet, participants consistently described a desire to transform, which I call a “transformational impetus.” Implications for post-secondary persistence among Mexican-American collegians are discussed, as are implications for advancing racial justice for the Latina/o/x population more broadly.

The Right to Equal Protection

This chapter examines a school desegregation lawsuit out of Denver, Colorado:Keyes v. School District No. 1. This case was the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled on the issue of de facto segregation, which involved the separation of students by race that was not directly the result of law. This chapter places the case in its context, in which the Chicano Movement rose to challenge discrimination against Mexican American students in the city’s public schools. The chapter explores the conflicts between the ways that black and Chicano activists pursued justice in education. The chapter argues that Keyes was an important case in the court’s articulation of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection jurisprudence, as the courts limited the kinds of claims that advocates for black and Chicano students could make about the quality of education they received at school.

Supporting Continued Academic Success, Resilience, and Agency of Boys in Urban Catholic Alternative Middle Schools

The persistent inequalities in urban public education in the U. S. that have left far too many Black and Hispanic male students behind with respect to academic skill development, high school graduation, and college success have led Catholic groups to provide alternative secondary school models to advance the academic and career success of urban students. One of these initiatives is the NativityMiguel model school, the first of which opened in New York City in 1971. The present study examines the lived experience, with respect to benefits of this education on the subsequent academic and career successes, of male graduates of two of these schools, one for African American, or Black, students and one for Mexican American students in different parts of the country. Analyses of interviews with 37 graduates showed that they benefitted from the schools’ approach to academic skill development and the building of resilience, leadership, and a commitment to service in the context of a community that continued to support the development of resilience after middle school graduation. Differences in aspects of the two programs are examined along with the implications for making use of the schools’ initiatives on a larger scale.

Supporting Mathematics Teachers to Build Deep Understandings of the Home Contexts of their Students

Teachers face many challenges in meeting the cultural diversity they encounter in current mathematics classrooms. To avoid marginalisation of specific groups of students we advocate for a strength-based approach in which teachers are supported to build deep understandings of the lived home context of their students. We discuss findings from our research projects with immigrant students (Pāsifika) in New Zealand and with Mexican American students in the United States. While our contexts are quite different, our approaches have much in common, in particular through their focus on teachers learning from and about their students’ communities to then build on this learning in their mathematics teaching. Bridging theory and practice, we share specific strategies that we have used to support teachers as learners of their students’ home contexts (e.g., home visits; parents’ classroom visits; school meetings led by parents).

A Medical Archaeopedagogy of the Human Body as a Trauma-Informed Teaching Strategy for Indigenous Mexican-American Students

In this article, three co-authors share their narratives and clay figurines sculpted during the Mesoamerican Figurine Project of Rio Hondo College (Garcia, in press-a). Through reflective writing exercises and the sculpting of small-scale clay figurines, Los Angeles-based Mexican-American students unearthed parts of their Mesoamerican ancestry and materialized their stories of displacement and violence to assist in meeting student learning outcomes (SLOs). After interpreting these data alongside the medical tools observed on the four Tezcatlipocas of Mesoamerica (Acosta, 2007), the supposition is that Indigenous Mesoamerican students benefit when engaged through the following topics: 1) land and cosmology, 2) trauma and medicine, 3) resiliency and self-determination, and 4) community and family. To support all students’ educational and mental health goals, and to prevent further trauma accumulation, the Mesoamerican figurine is modeled as a pedagogical tool with a wide range of therapeutic values. By employing a critical autoethnographic approach (Ohito, 2017), Instructor Garcia’s ancestral knowledge—combined with his students’ insights—enabled his conceptualization of a medical archaeopedagogy of the human body as a trauma-informed teaching strategy (Cole, Eisner, Gregory, & Ristuccia, 2013) to begin to address the mental health challenges prevalent in the Mexican-American community related to the cultural genocide of Native Americans.