| This dissertation is a long-term study of a community of students, families, teachers, and activists. The students are a cohort of multiethnic and multilingual students of color, who were tracked together at an inner-city public school in Los Angeles. The context of this study is a community that is mostly immigrant, includes a large Asian population, and has high poverty and dropout rates. This study's key concerns are social justice approaches to teaching and grassroots organizing, and their long-term outcomes with everyday applications of literacies, critical consciousness, and agency. This study begins when most of the cohort, known as the Sensational Students, were in first grade. It concludes when they were in ninth grade During their elementary years, the pedagogies with the students were based in classrooms and practices around student resistance, collaboration, performance, decolonization, and community building. At the end of fourth grade, the students demonstrated high achievement with indicators associated with critical and academic outcomes. During their secondary years, they continued to be engaged in pedagogies based in community organizations and practices around critical literacy, college access, mentorship, organizing, sports and martial arts.;To examine the long-term impact of the pedagogies with the students, this study used a framework grounded in ethnic studies, community organizing, culturally relevant pedagogy, sociocultural learning, critical pedagogy, and New Literacy Studies. It employed a critical action research agenda utilizing surveys, interviews, and focus groups. The pedagogical experiences the students identified as most agentive were collaboration and teamwork, understanding and empathizing with "the other," and becoming aware of the world's realities and doing something about them. One major implication of this study concerns sustainability. Over the years, sustaining social justice approaches to organizing and teaching illustrated the importance of thoughtful and disciplined approaches to relationships, conflict resolution, and resources. Another implication concerns the methodological and pedagogical concept of community reorganizing. This implication speaks to a re-organization of communities as the foundation and nexus of teaching and organizing, through recognition, solidarity, and collaboration with local communities of students. |
