Modesto City Schools’ ethnic studies course includes topics such as decolonization, systems of power, oppression, and requires students to engage in various forms of activism; required course materials include Newsela’s controversial ‘California Ethnic Studies Collection’

SUMMARY

Modesto City Schools’ revised ethnic studies course includes a focus on decolonization, systems of power, oppression, and requires students to engage in forms of activism. The required course uses Newsela’s “California Ethnic Studies Collection” which includes topics such as  “colorism,” “environmental racism,” “implicit bias,” “intersectionality,” “patriarchy,” and “white supremacy.”

The course description states that students will “develop an understanding of how race, ethnicity, nationality, and culture have shaped and continue to shape individuals and society in the United States.” It will also prepare “students to participate in concurrent or subsequent social studies and literature courses with a solid understanding of historical trends and historical thinking.”

The course will also engage students in “rigorous content constructed around issues of ethnicity, identity, service, and social justice.” Students will also “research and examine how twentieth-century events reveal power, privilege, ethnocentricity, systemic oppression, and cultural hegemony that influence their individual experiences into the twenty-first century.”

Read more about Newsela, other ethnic studies publishers, and consultants in our report Liberated: K-12 Liberated Ethnic Studies Industrial Complex.

COURSE UNITS AND CONTENT

The first unit introduces students to the origins of ethnic studies, “dominant narrative,” and “counter-narratives.” Students will also learn about “dehumanization” and “decolonization.”

The course’s fourth unit titled “Systems of Power” has students exploring how “race, gender, class, and sexual orientation affect various groups and identify the systems in place that create inequities.” The unit will also “focus on how systemic inequities in public institutions, private institutions, and the economic system have functioned over time to impact groups’ oppression.”

A sample assignment for the unit features students creating a “Public Service Announcement” to distribute in their schools “that challenge particular stereotypes in terms of institutional, interpersonal, and internalized oppression.”

The fifth unit has students examining the “historical conditions and significance of social movements the gains achieved through solidarity, activism, civil disobedience, and participation in the democratic process.” Additionally, students will “study resistance to oppression, the broad support these movements mobilized, and identify contemporary issues of oppression to identity.”

The final unit titled “Action” has students exploring the “problems of practice in their own communities.” The unit sample assignment includes an “Action Research Project” where students will “identify a problem/issue/conflict either locally or globally and craft a project that addresses the problem, in relation to a unit of the course.” Student projects should “analyze the main issues of the problem, highlight what, if anything, is currently being done to stop it, and propose their solutions.”