This edited volume is a collection of empirical scholarship that focuses on curriculum as knowledge connected to the Latinx diaspora from three perspectives: content/subject matter; goals, objectives, and purposes; and experiences. In an effort to fill a void in scholarship in curriculum studies/theory for/from Latinx perspectives, this book is a beginning toward answering two important questions: first, what is the significance of the presence and absence of Latinx curriculum theorizing? And second, in what ways is Latinx curriculum theorizing connected to curriculum, as a general concept, schools’ purposes, goals, and objectives and curriculum as autobiographical? This book opens a door into understanding curriculum for/from an important population in U.S. society.

In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide. Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Book Award During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the public. Subsequently, youth literature and media were important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought as a means of negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance. In Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, author Marilisa Jiménez García focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for US communities of color. Through analysis of texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies such as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought. Considering recent debates over diversity in children’s and young adult literature and media and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, Jiménez García's timely work encourages us to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, as well as other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.

Applying a critical lens to language education, this book explores the tensions that Latinx students face in relation to their identities, social and institutional settings, and other external factors. Across diverse contexts, these students confront complex debates and contestable affirmations that intersect with their lived experiences and social histories. Martinez and Train highlight the pedagogic and ethical urgency of teacher responsibility, learner agency and social justice in critically addressing the consequences, constraints, and affordances of the language education that Latinx students experience in historically-situated and institutionally defined spaces of practice, ideology and policy. Reframing language studies to take into account the roles of power, inequality, and social settings, this book provokes dialogue between areas of language education that rarely interface. Through privileging the learner experience, the book provides a window to the contested spaces across language education and generates new opportunities for engagement and action. Offering nuanced and insightful analyses, this book is ideal for scholars, language researchers, language teacher educators and graduate students in all areas of language education.

bell hooks—feminist scholar, teacher, activist—implored instructors to see the classroom as a “radical space of possibility” where students and teachers work as partners in the pursuit of education as “collective liberation” from structures of domination. hooks’ call takes on more urgency today, as oppressive and dominant ideologies continue to perpetuate racial, economic, gender, and other social inequities both within the classroom and society at large. Through critical commentary reflections on classroom experiences and original teaching activities, the authors in bell hooks' Engaged Pedagogy for the 21st Century Classroom: Radical Spaces of Possibility provide inspiration for teachers with the will to learn and the courage to teach about intersecting systems of oppression in meaningful, radical ways. The goal of this collection is to carry forth hooks’ legacy of education as freedom and to serve as a guide that renews faith that “teaching to transgress” racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression is not only possible, but is a first step in transforming the world.

"In recent years, social studies scholars have pushed to consider critical ways of thinking about curriculum, particularly challenging what we teach and how we teach. Authors in this book, however, speak specifically about culturally and linguistically accessing and engaging with social studies and citizenship education curricula and instruction. Through this project, the notion of inclusiveness and relevance centers on culture and language that emphasize the civic identity, agency, and membership of communities most often marginalized by social studies and civic instruction, public schools, and U.S. democratic society. We hope this collection of chapters acts as a resource to address pedagogical, sociocultural, and civic wonderings by highlighting ways of using language as an asset and means in the social studies classroom. This book presents new pedagogical ideas, theoretical frameworks, and research methodologies on teaching culturally and linguistically relevant social studies with and for emergent bilingual and multilingual (EBML) youth. The compilation of chapters seeks to forefront scholarship and teaching that centers the needs, interests, and experiences of EBML youth in social studies education. Chapter authors draw from multiple, intersecting critical and interdisciplinary frameworks that center culture and language to inform and write about social studies taking place inside, outside, and beyond the classroom that engages youth in varying disciplinary and non-disciplinary spaces across social studies education: (e.g., community, geography, family, civics, history). The chapters also challenge oppressive structures, policies, and practices that marginalize EBML youth. The book is intended for Pre-K-12 teachers and administrators, social studies teacher educators and researchers, and pre-service social studies teachers to actively read, reflect on, and strive to enact the work shared by chapter authors"--

"This book comprehensively but succinctly tells the story of LatCrit's emergence and sustainable presence as a scholarly and activist community within and beyond the US legal academy, finding its place alongside such other schools of critical legal knowledge as Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory that aim to combust social and legal transformative change"--