Building knowledge as a collective
The reciprocal learning environment in the classroom sets Rosa’s course apart from many community partnerships at Stanford and elsewhere, said Paitra Houts, MA ’08, director of community engaged learning in education at the Haas Center.
“Often when we talk about community-engaged learning, we think about courses where students are tutoring or doing a project for an organization,” she said. “In Jonathan’s class, everybody in that space is learning something new from each other, building knowledge as a collective.”
The class explores issues including the history and legacy of European colonization, Chicanx/Latinx literary and cultural traditions, assimilation and identity, and political and economic shifts. Discussions draw not only from Rosa’s lectures and a rigorous reading list but heavily from the students’ lived experience.
“In privileged spaces, there are all kinds of knowledge that we’re not sensitive to – knowledge about labor, about migration, about survival, about citizenship,” said Rosa. “These are forms of knowledge that exist in families and communities. The university is not the only place where we hold and create knowledge. The university is where we give order to knowledge, where we reproduce it and typologize it in certain ways. But knowledge is created everywhere.”
That premise set the tone for a course that dissolved traditional hierarchies.
“I thought I would be one of the grown college students mentoring the high schoolers, teaching them things about Latinadad,” said Kevin Calderon, a senior at Stanford majoring in comparative studies of race and ethnicity. “But the class was structured for all of us to learn together, for us to see ourselves and the high school students as people situated in different knowledge bases.”
A million miles away
About 60 percent of students at Sequoia High School identify as Chicanx/Latinx, said Elisa Niño-Sears, a program director at the high school who has collaborated with Rosa on the course from the start.
“Sequoia is 20 minutes from the Stanford campus, but it can feel like a million miles away,” said Niño-Sears, a 1995 Stanford alum. Before the pandemic, when classes took place at the high school, she observed a shift in the Stanford students – the majority of whom also identify as Chicanx/Latinx – after they entered the building.
“You could see them kind of become their old selves,” she said. “I think being in a more normal place was reinvigorating for a lot of the Stanford students, who can get into the mindset that if you don’t have your app and your venture capital funding by the time you’re 20, life is over.”