Overview and Content Objectives
This unit is designed as a freshman social studies elective class. Although it was created for freshmen, the unit can be tailored to any grade level. The unit’s structure follows the same structure as my year-long ethnic studies class. The year is divided into thematic units: education, housing, immigration and citizenship, workers’ rights, and the criminal justice system. Students study problems specific to people of color and the roots of such issues. Then, they analyze and reflect on the issues’ current impacts on themselves and their community. Finally, students learn, critique, and adapt the successes and lessons of the various social movements and youth-led responses.
Students will be using the following essential questions to understand how and why youth of color have been overcriminalized in our society and ways they can challenge the overcriminalization of youth of color:
- Why is there a disproportionate number of young people of color in the juvenile justice system?
- How do public institutions (schools, law enforcement, government) control, criminalize, and push youth of color into the prison pipeline?
- How can young people of color help reduce the school-to-prison pipeline? What can you do to solve the problems our community faces?
The unit is purposefully divided into two parts: understanding the current system of oppression, and learning how to address it. The first half aims to address the reasons institutions have prevented young people’s success and how institutions continue to push them further into the margins of grinding poverty or prison. Students will learn that young people of color were criminalized by society and state governments even before the juvenile justice system’s inception. Students will study the history of the juvenile justice system, its blatant disregard to serve youth of color, and its failure to rehabilitate this specific group. Then, students will look into how implicit bias and the characterizations of youth as delinquents have created policies in schools, law enforcement, and in California that push youth of color to fail and locks them in the prison pipeline.
The second half of the unit helps students reclaim their power and confront these damaging narratives. This goal will be achieved by studying youth activism’s significance and impact. The class will reframe students’ stories as political acts of resistance through an analysis of the anti-Super Jail Campaign. Students will analyze youth organizing’s successes and pitfalls by studying the anti-Super Jail campaign and what Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) entails. They will then engage in a YPAR project where they will conduct research, run a campaign, and hopefully initiate a program to address issues that plague students and the school-wide community. Although YPAR will be used to address issues in East San Jose faces; YPAR’S principles can be tailored to one’s specific community. I have added two school-specific issues (school fights and zero-tolerance policies) and a local one using law enforcement in interventions to decrease juvenile crime (using law enforcement interventions to decrease juvenile crime) that connect well with the unit’s themes. Because students do need some structure when starting a new project, I have added two suggested programs that follow restorative principles: peer mediation and youth court. Groups of students who struggle with the project can study the suggested programs and adapt or modify them to better suit the school’s and community’s needs. The end of this unit is a call to action. The culminating YPAR project recognizes the East Side’s spirit of activism. My students and I will continue to fight for the community’s rights and dignity.
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