Mexican American Student Services
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Mexican American Student Services
Sean Arce
Director
1010 E. 10th St.
Tucson, AZ 85719
(520) 225-6229
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Mexican American Student Services
Mexican American Student Services Model
The objective of Mexican American Student Services is to create a truly equitable educational ecology. We offer our students:
- Academic rigor
- The opportunity to develop a critical consciousness
- Social and academic scaffolds to increase student success
We offer help so that students can enter the world independently, prepared to control their lives and provide leadership to their world.
Developed from research within the Social Justice Education Project, the model fosters Critically Compassionate Intellectualism. This model includes the following components:
- A counter-hegemonic curriculum.
- A pedagogy based on the theories of Paolo Friere.
- Student-teacher interactions centered on authentic caring.
For Latino students, each of these components creates both a Latino academic identity and an enhanced level of academic proficiency. The end result is an elevated state of Latino academic achievement. For Latino students, the model serves as a mirror; for non-Latino students, the model serves as a window into cultural, historical, and social understanding.
Curriculum
Using the transformative curriculum model, the Chicano/Latino voice, experience, perspective, and history are moved from the margin to the center of the curriculum. This approach is supported by research by Banks (1995), Nieto (1999), Phinney & Rotheram (1987), and Yasso (2002). Mexican American Student Services has found that its curriculum, because of its inclusiveness and its critical nature, offers all students the opportunity to engage in a learning process which transcends the depth of any previous experience.
Pedagogy
Influenced by the work of scholar Paulo Freire, our lessons follow the framework of critical pedagogy, popular education, and the related participatory action research. The key premise holds that students should be equal partners in the construction of knowledge, identification of social problems, and implementation of solutions to these problems. Freire's concept of "critical literacy" encourages students to adopt "an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one's context" (Freire, 1998, p. 86).
To establish a learning partnership between students and educators, lessons are structured to engage students and educators in dialogue. This participatory approach empowers students to become equal partners in the learning process.
Dialogue is an "I-Thou" relationship, and thus, necessarily, a relationship between two subjects. Each time the "thou" is changed into an object, an "it", dialogue is subverted and education is subverted and education is changed to deformation. (Freire, 1998, p. 89)
Mexican American Student Services offers this type of critical thinking and critical dialogue, which has typically been reserved to advanced placement or honors courses (Solorzano & Ornelas, 2002), into classes which are accessible to all students.
Student-Teacher Interaction
Our model promotes teachers to approach and experience their students from a state of "authentic caring". Authentic caring (Valenzuela, 1999) occurs when teachers connect with students' full humanity.
This approach fits with the "educational ecology" advocated by Ruiz and Moll (2002). Educational ecology understands and attributes social and educational capital to the cultural and socio-historical experiences that have nurtured the development of each and every student we encounter (Ruiz, 1997). The ideology and structure of the education experienced by Latinos and children of color must be reflective of the educational ecology of each of these students. This approach provides Latino students and students of color with the same quality of educational sovereignty afforded Anglo students.