Fort Bragg Unified School District ethnic studies course features content that challenges systems that ‘uphold economic and political privileges and power,’ promotes youth activism.

Fort Bragg Unified School District’s ethnic studies course features content such as colonization, intersectionality, systems of power and oppression, and promotes youth activism.

The 10th grade course scope and sequence states that the “innovative course is designed to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the diverse cultural, historical, and social contributions of various ethnic groups in the United States” and is “grounded in the core pillars of Identity, Innovations, Cultures, and Movements, the curriculum aims to foster critical thinking and empathy among students.”

Unit focuses include identity, colonization, systems of power, and transformative movements, students will engage with essential questions about justice, intersectionality, and community.

“Enduring understandings” state that ethnic studies “questions dominant narratives, systems, and their creation to reestablish narratives and systems to center BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities and their intersections to other social categories.”

The third unit on colonization includes claiming that in the US, it has “created power structures that perpetuate inequality contrary to the dominant narrative of an equal society.”

Other understandings include race as a “social construct designed to create and uphold economic and political privileges and power,” the “experiences of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities challenge the idea of American citizenship, especially when it is rooted in colonization,” and youth activism.

Curriculum “sample lessons” include a link to a Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) website that features links to lessons such as Who are Arab Americans: An Introduction, which includes a “Palestine land acknowledgement” and ancestor acknowledgement of Edward Said.