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ESSJ SUPPORTS THE MOVEMENT TO PROTECT RAMIREZ FARM

Special thank you to Ms. Rasiah and Logan Live for the PSA spot

CLASS OF 2023 PRAXIS PROJECTS
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👆🏾Take Back The Mic 2023👆🏾

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The Ethnic Studies & Social Justice Academy

After a decade-long battle to challenge common practices in high school core Social Science and English-Language Arts curriculum, The Ethnic Studies & Social Justice Academy was piloted during the 2019-2020 school year, and then formally launched in the Fall of 2020. Following the lead of San Leandro High School’s Social Justice Academy as a model, ESSJ seeks to educate our scholars within a holistically humanizing space that centers voices of the young scholars in the classroom, as well as the voices of BIPOC communities, their ancestors, allies, and co-conspirators in order to develop critical consciousness lens during their educational experience.

ESSJ is designed for students who want to realize their potential as agents of positive and transformative social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political change in themselves, their communities, and the larger local, national, and global contexts they live in . ESSJ utilizes a rigorous three-year process where students learn to interweave critical and decolonial theory and action to reach praxis, whereby ESSJ scholars leave the program with a stronger sense of self, community, and agency.

ESSJ Guiding Principles

THE PROGRAM

ESSJ uses the following structures to ensure student success:

- Looping cohorts of students through ESSJ Social Science and English-Language Arts courses for three years*.

- Specially designed curriculum that focuses on ethnic studies, social justice, gender studies, peer education, campaign development and activism, social and emotional skill development, college-level research, critical thinking, and public speaking skills.

- Field trips, guest speakers, project-based learning, internships/mentorship and events that connect to the curriculum.

ESSJ is a 3 - year small-school program within a large comprehensive high school that will focus on three major concepts integral to Ethnic Studies and Social Justice. Each concept will be the main theme for Academy scholars as they move together through their core courses, connecting the concepts through the coursework of each year.

1. ANALYZE Sophomores (Identity): The 10th-grade year for ESSJ sophomores will focus on providing students with a foundation on identity, common struggles, systems of oppression, and social constructions of race, class, and gender. The goal of the first year is to build a strong sense and knowledge of self and community and to begin to develop critical consciousness.

2. ORGANIZE Juniors (Activism and Organizing): Academy students will focus on solidarity and collective action throughout their 11th-grade year. Building on the work from the previous year, students learn the basics of activism and organizing, movement building, and campaign development. Over the course of the year, students work as a class to conduct a needs assessment and develop a focus for a year-long campaign they will run in their senior year.

3. MOBILIZE Seniors (PRAXIS): The focus of the 12th-grade year for Academy students is self-determination and critical consciousness. Senior year requires students to conduct an independent research-action project on an issue of their choice. Students research, conduct interviews, do field-work, and create a mini-campaign throughout the course of the year. The class ends with a public testimony of their work. In addition to this, they run a campaign as a class, which might be local, national, or even global in its scope.

The Ethnic Studies and Social Justice Academy is available to students beginning in their 10th-grade year and to students continuing in the Academy from the preceding year only. Ninth graders interested in ESSJ can sign up and apply to be in the Academy.

PILLARS OF ESSJ

KNOWLEDGE

ESSJ educators and scholars build a critical, intersectional consciousness that challenges traditional educational curriculum, standards, and pedagogy.
Challenge and criticize power, oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, and xenophobia on the internal, interpersonal, institutional, and ideological levels.
Reimagine themselves and their communities outside of the master narrative.

COMMUNITY

ESSJ educators and scholars cultivate a familial structure that values holistic humanization, compassion, community cultural wealth, and critical and radical love and hope.
Center the communities that have been marginalized.
Understand personal, collective, and generational experiences, trauma, and resilience.
Cultivate compassion and move towards healing.
Utilize a restorative justice framework that allows students to thrive, heal, and build resilience.

SOLIDARITY

ESSJ educators and scholars learn the importance of solidarity and understand that they must transcend mere symbolic and transactional solidarity and embody intersectional and transformative solidarity, true activism.
Take action on a local, national, and global scale.
Learn from resistance movements of the past and present.
Disrupt systems of power and oppression.
Develop a sense of agency and accountability.