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. 

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KNOWLEDGE

• ESSJ educators and scholars build a critical, intersectional consciousness that challenges traditional educational curricula, 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.