ETHNIC STUDIES & SOCIAL JUSTICE
ACADEMY
The Program
ESSJ strives to create a humanizing educational space that allows students to build a sense of community, support, and solidarity. This is achieved through a rigorous three-year curriculum and supplemental (usually student-led) activities, events, and campaigns, following the following structure, features, and principles.
Looping Cohorts
Special Curriculum
Students advance through ESSJ's Social Science and English-Language Arts courses alongside the same group of students they entered with. This builds stronger connections...
Unique Opportunities
Unlike traditional Social Science and English classes, ESSJ 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. Preparing students for the real world
Field trips, guest speakers, project-based learning, internships/mentorship and events that connect to the curriculum.
The Three Years
Throughout the three years of the program, ESSJ focuses 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.
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.
ORGANIZE
Juniors - Activism & 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.
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 Pillars
01
KNOWLEDGE
ESSJ educators and scholars
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Build a critical, intersectional consciousness that challenges traditional educational curricula, standards, and pedagogy.
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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.
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Reimagine themselves and their communities outside of the master narrative.
02
COMMUNITY
ESSJ educators and scholars
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Cultivate a familial structure that values holistic humanization, compassion, community cultural wealth, and critical and radical love and hope.
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Center the communities that have been marginalized.
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Understand personal, collective, and generational experiences, trauma, and resilience.
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Cultivate compassion and move towards healing.
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Utilize a restorative justice framework that allows students to thrive, heal, and build resilience.
03
SOLIDARITY
ESSJ educators and scholars
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Learn the importance of solidarity and understand that they must transcend mere symbolic and transactional solidarity and embody intersectional and transformative solidarity, true activism.
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Take action on a local, national, and global scale.
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Learn from resistance movements of the past and present.
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Disrupt systems of power and oppression.
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Develop a sense of agency and accountability.
