Cati V. de los Ríos is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Education. de los Ríos is a former ELD, Spanish and Ethnic Studies high school teacher in California. Her empirical research explores 1) racially and linguistically minoritized students’ critical and civic literacy learning in Ethnic Studies classrooms, and 2) the lived civic practices and critical expressivity of Latinx bi/multilingual immigrant families and youth. Her ethnographic, participatory, and community-based scholarship has received several best paper awards and early career awards from American Educational Research Association and Literacy Research Association. de los Ríos’s research has also been recognized by The National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation (Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowships) and National Academies of Science/Ford Foundation (Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowships). Her recent research can be found in journals like Applied Linguistics, Harvard Educational Review, Aztlán: a Journal of Chicano Studies, and Anthropology & Education Quarterly.
Linguistically and racially minoritized youth’s experiences with racial, linguistic, socioeconomic, and infrastructural inequities are valuable forms of civic and political knowledge that too often go overlooked in classrooms. Using a lived civics (Cohen et al., 2018) analytic frame, this research presentation analyzes the civic learning opportunities in two California school districts’ Ethnic Studies programs with significant emergent bilingual/English Learner populations (one urban school district in the Bay Area, the other an urban school district in Southern California). Drawing from ethnographic and participatory design methodologies, I home in on two classroom teachers that leveraged participating Latinx, Black, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian American students' lived civic experiences, cultural perspectives, and digital media practices for impactful community-engagement and critical reading, writing, and multimodal text production. I discuss how these Ethnic Studies curricular spaces of intense reading and writing supplemented the often non-existent or very low-quality civic education that immigrant-origin students and students of color receive in California classrooms. The presentation ends with implications for policy, research, and practice on the nexus of civics and ethnic studies instruction, especially given the recent approval of California AB 101 which will require one semester of ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement beginning 2029-2030.
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