Education should comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable

— Joseph Kahne.

This is my first blog post EVERRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

So the reason why I decided to teach Latin America and the Caribbean this year is because . . . honestly . . . we just really should have a class on this at APR. 28% of students at APR are Hispanic (PublicSchoolReview 2020) and an even greater percentage hail from Latin America and the Caribbean. It seems ludicrous to me that students wouldn’t see themselves represented in the curriculum especially when attending ethnic studies classes has the capability to drastically increase student achievement. For example, Tuscon Public Schools found that participants in their Latin American Studies Program, La Raza, went from a XX% graduation rate to a XX% graduation rate (McGinnis, E. & Palos, A., 2011). Students also reported that [do your own work here] (ibid).

While I was excited to jump into teaching this course, I am still a bit hesitant. The problem is that I am not Caribbean or Latin American. I haven’t traveled there extensively and I haven’t studied extensive coursework on the area. I worry that I am failing to take Courtney Martin’s advice to stay home and face my own country’s problems or to “go if [I] must, but stay long enough, listen hard enough so that ‘other people’ become real people” (Martin, C., 2016). I worry that this survey course will not have the depth or experience to be meaningful and may end up actually doing more harm than good.

These things considered, I can’t ignore the fact that ethnic studies courses have real “value for students” which becomes “clearer over time” (Anderson, M., 2016). I know that I will make mistakes and pick wrong texts and learn alongside my students but I hope that we can demonstrate both intellectual humility and intellectual bravery in trying to understand all that we can about an important and under-taught region of the globe.