Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Trustees
in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted unanimously to
make completion of an Ethnic Studies class a high school graduation requirement
by the 2023-2024 school year. In addition to the course requirement, the motion
approved by the School District made the Superintendent of Schools responsible
for ensuring support for educators to integrate Ethnic Studies into the Pre-K
to Grade 8 curriculum.
The decision will affect many students. LAUSD, the second largest school district in the United States, serves more than 600,000 students, about the same number of students as attend public schools in British Columbia or maybe a few more.
The trustee who introduced the motion said “. . . recent protests calling for equality across the nation have shown us the value in education in dismantling institutionalized racism and inequity.” She also said, “The majority of the students we serve in L.A. Unified are Black and Latino, and it’s important for them to learn about their history and see themselves reflected in our curricula.”
There is much to applaud in the decision of LAUSD. Infusing the curriculum with what LAUSD calls ethnic studies will ensure that the subject matter becomes part of the course of study rather than an add-on. In assigning responsibility to the Superintendent for ensuring teachers have the needed support sends a signal. Educators need assistance in learning how to teach about the history and contributions of the groups who have suffered from institutionalized racism and inequity. It is one thing to include a body of material in the curriculum, but something entirely different when it comes to teaching about it without perpetuating racist stereotypes and stigmatizing the people whose history and accomplishments are being taught.
One could ask why a special motion is necessary to ensure the inclusion of this material? Why is it not already part of the curriculum being taught today? The answer is racism, the institutional exclusion, marginalization, and denigration of the groups whose history and contributions are now to be included.
There is one place I disagree with Kelly Gonez, the trustee who introduced the motion. Part of her argument was that it was important for students to learn about their history and see themselves in the curricula because Black and Latino students comprised a majority of the students in the district. I disagree. Even if there were no Latino or Black students in the district, it would be important to include knowledge of the history and contributions of Latinos and Blacks. The knowledge is important not because of their physical presence but because excluding it makes students less well educated and more likely to perpetuate institutional racism and inequality.
I raise this California initiative in my blog, which is principally about Canada, because the curricula in Canadian school jurisdictions largely ignores the history and contributions of Indigenous people and their systematic mistreatment by settlers. When Indigenous people and people of colour are included in the curriculum, they are represented in a superficial way that stereotypes them and makes them seem foreign or exotic. The exclusion and misrepresentation are manifestations of the institutional racism that pervades Canadian education.
I think referring to “ethnic studies” is also a manifestation of unconscious institutional racism. Gonez and her colleagues want to draw attention to groups that have been excluded – particularly Latino and Black Americans. But the term ethnic has negative connotation. At worst it is often taken to mean racial, tribal, or folkloric. At best, it is taken to mean cultural.
Using the term ethnic, as Gonez does, unintentionally implies that there are traits or cultural practices that are the essence of the people to whom the term is applied. This inadvertently ignores the diversity among the individuals who may choose to identify with the group to which reference is being made.
Speaking about curricular inclusion requires serious, continuing, and difficult conversations that are just getting started in the Canadian context. But eliminating institutionalized racism does not begin and end with curricular inclusion. There are other features of the system that need to be addressed. From school entry to graduation, there are structures, practices, and assumptions that need examination and change.