Abstract
This chapter is the story of the authors' journey using community mapping in graduate coursework to make visible the assets in local communities through experiential learning. Community mapping is an experiential, inquiry-based ethnographic research method that can be utilized by various community members to understand a community better. In this case, teachers uncovered language and literacy present in the communities and created contextualized learning experiences by connecting students' lived realities to school instruction. The authors began with discussions around community and ethnographic projects to understand what was present in the community. This evolved to include some form of action, primarily in the form of curricular reform and critical literacy projects and/or culturally sustaining pedagogies.
TopIntroduction
How do we define community and how does community relate to education? This question persists in the ways we think about and plan for our own pedagogies and graduate courses in education. Because engaging with communities around the schools, students, and families we serve is vital to our work as critical teacher educators, we have asked graduate students to engage with their communities in various ways over the past decade in our graduate courses. While the specific requirements and some details vary due to the evolving nature of our teaching, the needs of a diverse and multifaceted society, along with professional educator preparation standards, the goals remain constant. The goals and objectives of our courses require students to engage in deep and meaningful ways with their communities in order to understand them more fully, shed deficit perspectives (Valencia, 1997), and lead to social action. This chapter will draw on several different semesters of graduate coursework to describe the ways we (Minda López and Tara Newman) have engaged graduate students in engagement with their communities along with ways to recognize and honor the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) present therein. We also include the voice of a graduate student who participated in this work as a graduate student and teacher (Callie Day). This chapter describes graduate students’ experiences with the community mapping assignment over several years and their reflections at the end of the semester that provide insight into the transformative nature of the experience. First, we detail the underlying premises of engaging with communities and the assignment goals and objectives, next we discuss ways we focused on community cultural wealth as a way to dispel deficit views, and finally we provide examples of how graduate students were moved to action.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Teacher Education: The process of certifying and training teachers for the knowledge, behaviors, and skills they require to be effective teachers in the classroom.
Transformative experience: A learning experience that facilitates change in perception and generates value to the participant.
Community Cultural Wealth: A method for uncovering the assets in a community, particularly communities of color. This concept was first introduced by Tara Yosso (2005) who described eight components or capitals to community cultural wealth including aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistance.
Critical Race Theory: A framework used to examine culture, society, and other phenomenon through the lens of race and racialized experiences (Bell, 1987; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001).
Deficit Thinking: The notion that students, families, and communities, particularly historically marginalized and communities of color are at fault and responsible for the challenges and systemic inequalities they face.
Community Mapping: An experiential, inquiry-based method of ethnographic research that can be utilized by community members to identify community resources and assets of various kinds.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Methods and curricular components in education that provide affirming lifeways for communities that have been historically marginalized and even erased through various schooling experiences (see Paris, 2012).