Little Village Lawndale High School (LVLHS) has a recent but rich history in Chicago that captures the attention of those of us who dedicate our teaching towards matters of social justice. Its creation and ongoing mission both point towards the possible within public education and community involvement. From its inception in the hearts and action of its community members to its continued dedication from students, teachers, and neighbors, LVLHS has been an example of culture and community becoming the identity of a school and, even more exceptional, the source for its curriculum.
The school is located in Little Village, a predominantly Latino community on Chicago’s southwest side. The neighborhood is one of the most highly populated communities in the city, and when funds were opened up by Chicago Public Schools in 1998, Little Village was one of three areas to be slated for a new school. While the other two neighborhoods received their schools by 2001, both of which serve predominantly white communities and practice selective enrollment for their admission, the high school for Little Village was never created. School officials, most notably the CEO Paul Vallas, stated that the funds had run out and were no longer available.
After many disappoints trying to work through the system for a new school, the last straw for the community members took place when the facilities manager for CPS, Tim Martin, visited Little Village and offered options that failed to provide for the amount of students the community had hoped. When the choices were responded to with protests, Martin stated that their hopes for the new school were unfounded and “their sons would still end up in gangs, while their daughters would still get pregnant” (Friedman, 146-148). This comment and the obviously unfair treatment prompted the community to organize into what would become one of the most visible grassroots movements in Chicago’s contemporary history.
The culmination of actions resulted in the setting up of a protest camp on the site for the school and the declaration of a hunger strike on Mother’s Day 2001 by a group, mostly mothers and grandmothers, from the community. The site was named Camp Chavez in honor of the famous Chicano labor organizer Cesar Chavez. During the hunger strike, which lasted 19 days, the protesters remained focused on creating a space on their own terms, something that would last through the creation of the school and into its use. One prime example is when Paul Vallas finally admitted that there was a voice to be heard (highly suspected as a result of the national media convention of the protests) and visited Camp Chavez. When Vallas arrived, the protesters refused to leave their tents to speak to him. Instead, they waited for him to enter their tents and talk to them on their own terms, which included sitting on a milk crate during negotiations. This important moment seems to have given them the momentum to pursue the direction of the school on their terms as well as reinforce the belief in their power as a force within the community.
When a new appointee, Arne Duncan, took the office of CEO following Vallas that fall, the promise of funding had been renewed and the wheels set into motion to create the new school. The institutional practices of doing so, however, made it difficult for the community which had been so instrumental in the birth of the school to remain involved. Yet, through organization and keeping an ever-present voice, they established themselves as integral throughout the process.
The community sought for the school to embody not only the culture of the communities it would serve, but also represent the involvement and struggle that led to the school’s creation by those who lived within the community. The architects held public forums where community members could bring forth ideas essential to their goals and needs. Friedman cites the work of Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place, to point out that many believe that shared public spaces “have the power to evoke visual, social memory” (p. 150) and the architecture and the organization of the Little Village Lawndale High School reflect this. The memory of the 19 days of hunger strike are represented in both the 19 degree angles found in the buildings’ windows, in addition to a spire which contains a sun dial that allows light to reflect a series of mirrors on the actual days of the strike each year. Such examples are found throughout the building, in addition to inclusion of styles, icons, and symbols of the predominant Latino and African-American cultures served by the school.
In its organization, the school was created in following with the Small Schools Movement. Little Village Lawndale High School is a campus that houses four different high schools, each with a different mission: Multicultural Arts High School, World Language High School, Social Justice High School and Infinity Math, Science, and Technology High School. As the leaders within the school and the community members realized, it is within these schools, through organization (mission, planning, etc.) and curriculum that the realities of community and culture have the best potential to continue to keep the spirit and ideas alive that created the schools.
Each of the small schools within the campus of Little Village Lawndale High School include in their mission and vision statements concepts that are deeply connected to the spirit of community and culture, and what we now consider social justice within the world of education. Goals such as putting “into practice the ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity” and “to become critical thinkers who are culturally and socially responsible” (LVLHS website, 2009) show evidence of a continued connection related to the school’s history and community’s continued involvement. With so much attention on the school since its conception, dilemmas have arisen into the conversation about LVLHS, such as debate over its success – as measured by statistics and test scores and changes in leadership. Yet, still work of many teachers, students, and community members provides evidence that the missions and visions posted on their website are alive and strong. Those examples range from student presentations and teacher articles, to the opening of a community health center that serves students and neighborhood residents from the school building.
Most of the recent dialogue in academia about the focuses on the School of Social Justice – one of the small schools; also known as SOJO – especially in terms of curriculum and particularly due to the work of two individuals: Eric “Rico” Gutstein and David Stovall, both professors of education at University of Illinois at Chicago and teachers at SOJO. They have shared their work as teachers within the field of curriculum and educational policy in order to further promote and analyze education that reflects culture in positive and creative ways.
Gutstein (2007) discusses the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy, a term introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings, and how many educators have recognized it as important to have “knowledge of students and their families, communities, contexts, experiences, cultures, and languages” (p. 190). His desire as an educator is to assist in creating opportunities for students to participate in an actualization, in the sense of Paolo Freire’s work, towards liberation and humanization – goals central to most who consider themselves social justice educators. As Gutstein explains his ideas, he discusses how his curriculum moves towards building political relationships in his classroom, as a means for teaching towards social justice in a discipline generally considered devoid of skills other than content – the mathematics classroom.
For Gutstein, building a political relationship with students means that not only does the teacher spend time with the student in and outside of class to build a meaningful connection, it means taking it further into the world of social justice. For instance, he feels teachers should include the study of injustice, and he provided an example from his own classroom where students had to do a data analysis and probability project on racial profiling. In another, he shares a project about displacement (results of urban gentrification), which started by involving students in focus groups to assist create the actual project. Gutstein states that at SOJO, political uses of mathematics have become normalized to the point where students were actively involved in the dialogue about the curriculum.
In an action research project that Stovall pursued with a colleague who is also a lawyer, Delgado, students examined “the processes of the judicial system in order to analyze their own lives” within a colloquial setting at SOJO (Stovall & Delgado, 2009, p. 68). They facilitated the course, but its direction was student-led. Students generated issues of concern within their personal lives, and from there the curriculum developed through research components, actual involvement with the judicial system, and an actual engagement through presentation of ideas and lessons learned. This approach, which required for the students “to engage in a collective process that confronts the real-life conditions of young people in their communities” (Stovall & Delgado, 2009, p. 68) directly exhibits the goal of keeping the curriculum connected to the culture of the students and around the students.
They were not creating a curriculum outside of the students’ lives and identities, but directly from within. Stovall’s work includes more examples of directly involving the culture of the students within the curriculum. In a class he created with students, Education, Youth and Justice, students wrote an article that established who they were as a school and what they needed to do in order to improve as social justice high school, centered on and created from the community.
Searching through the examples of Stovall and Gutstein’s work, I was fulfilled in finding evidence within the dialogue of the academic education world of curriculum based on students’ lives and cultures that was more genuine, more critical than that of the typical multicultural education taught in most teacher education programs. Yet, still I feel disheartened that there is not a more extensive dialogue about these issues within the teaching community, one of the reasons I first pursued continuing my graduate study. The discussion is going on, but not in the teacher work rooms, not at professional developments, and not at after work cocktail hour. I believe there is a break between the teachers and the scholars, because we, as a nation/culture/etc., have separated the two. Still, Gutstein and Stovall are two examples, and I am grateful they are two nearby examples, of the two strangely separate fields converging in such a prolific way.
Little Village Lawndale High School has its struggles set before it in the world of public education and Chicago politics, but it is a living example of a school and a curriculum embodying a people – with their culture, histories, goals, and realities. When discussing small schools in the introduction to a book about social justice education, Maxine Greene states that in “the very least, there are opportunities for the long-silenced to be heard, for the invisible to become visible…they are open to multiplicity and difference. They can afford provocations to individuals to choose themselves” (Ayers, W., Hunt, J., & Quinn, T., 1998). I think it is safe to say that in the very least Little Village Lawndale High School has provided these opportunities, and beyond measure, has shown it is worth the try.
