How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America

An investigation into how schooling can enhance and hinder critical-racial consciousness through the making of the Latinx racialized group

In How Schools Make Race, Laura C. Ch?vez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students' concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Ch?vez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism.

In this provocative book, Ch?vez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students' critical consciousness about race and racialization.

Ultimately, Ch?vez-Moreno's groundbreaking work makes clear that understanding how our schools teach about racialized groups is crucial to understanding how our society thinks about race and offers solutions to racial inequities. The book invites educators and scholars to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race so that teachers and students are prepared to interrogate racist ideas and act toward just outcomes.

Author: Laura C. Ch?vez-Moreno
Publisher: Harvard Education PR
Published: 10/01/2024
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781682539224

About the Author
Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is assistant professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research has been recognized with multiple awards, including from the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. She also served as a teacher for five years in the Philadelphia Public School District.