“Cariño! Let’s go forest bathing,” a student shouts as she enters the classroom. I look at the Cultural Energizer (warm up) to see what I’ve planned and decide to forego it. This is typical, the young women of color in the class dictating what we should do everyday. Some days they might want to talk about the current event, others a Bad Bunny song “Lo Que Pasó Hawái”[1] and its connection to gentrification.

On occasion we would go to the neighborhood panderia to eat churros. The mood could be serious, like the times they felt the energy was off and wanted to speak on it in an attempt to repair it. Most days I conceded in some way. Rarely did I say no. Their impact lasted beyond our class time at school, like the many times I got home and noticed one of them took 20 selfies on my phone, resulting in a Cheshire grin and thoughts of “Oh those girls!”

For two years, I taught a youth leadership course in a comprehensive urban high school. Most comprehensive high schools across my district have such a class. The goal is for students to identify issues in their school, investigate the problem through original research, and create policy solutions that are shared with school administration and community leaders. The students meet three times a year with youth at other schools to provide and receive feedback on their projects. The final meeting–a student voice competition–culminates in a district gathering where each student team shares their policies. The judges include district folks, politicians, community leaders and activists.

However, this essay will not be about the course as described in the paragraph above. Instead it will be about the liminal spaces, the in between spaces, that these young bilingual women of color created, fostered and led in rhythm and flow. While I will discuss one class project in particular, the impacts of these young women extended beyond our classroom walls. Using Critical Race Feminism as a framework, I want to share their story in hopes that educators can reimagine how we support and uplift feminist leadership in our classrooms.

The theory and knowledges that Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) folks possess is fundamental to how schools should view students. Student leadership becomes the perfect pairing of theory and BIPOC student voice. Beauboeuf-Lafontant[2] who researched Black women teachers, found that the educators saw teaching as an act of mothering and educating. Delgado Bernal[3] used the Chicanx/Latinx feminista concept of “cultural intuition”, the embodiment of an individual’s mind, body and soul connection, to encapsulate the way the intersections of race and gender show up specifically in Chicanx/Latinx women.[4] While I know, these BIPOC young women are not formal teachers, their “othermothering” and “cultural intuition” were present daily within our classroom space.

These students weren’t nominated for leadership positions, they simply embodied them. Through the use of counter storytelling and their unique lived experience, their application of CRF tenets shaped their movement in the classroom. The empathy and passion they displayed was rooted in their identity formation as young women of color and they used counter storytelling as resistance to drive their topic choices and research styles. These particular students were Latine and Black, ranging in age from 16 – 18. Three are first generation born in the United States and one comes from a long generational line of Chicanx people in the current territory of the United States. These particular young women have a history of speaking out in classes and showing up to various protests, particularly for immigrants.

In our introductory class project, we reimagined the possibilities of schooling. This grounds the class in the purpose of our larger project which is to choose a social justice issue that can create more just schools. I have recently become interested in sound ecologies and soundscapes and how sounds tell the story of ourselves, our lives and our communities.[5] Because this class was creative, intellectual and passionate, I thought I’d throw this medium at them to see what they would come up with. The inquiry question was “What would it sound like to reimagine school?” The students’ innate attention to creativity, critical thinking and lived experiences, produced powerful projects.

Both examples are told in a nonlinear way that is able to hold multiple truths at once. When presented, both groups indicated that they were trying to reimagine school as a place that was community centered and dynamic. One of the students from the first example group stated:

This piece shows how school would sound calm, not stressful, yet multifaceted, with various environments and types of people positively blending and impacting your experience at school. At the beginning of the audio, we emphasize how it would sound walking inside the school, as it would not make you anxious; instead, you approach school with a positive mindset because of its welcoming environment. Depending on the classes you take, they will sound different, but the common thread is that they draw interest in learning through various genres of music. Ultimately, the school would be a community, with various perspectives meshing to create a unique, positive environment, with different conversations and laughter scattered around.

“What are you doing?” I asked as I watched the young woman cited above stomping on a table top with another student recording her steps. “I’m making footstep sounds. That’s why I brought these boots today.” The first student soundscape example opens with footsteps to elicit for the listener that they will be going on a journey. That journey is one of calm compared to the stress of current schooling with its emphasis on fast paced learning and test scores.

For the second student example, their piece opens with Marvine Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.” That particular choice in music was genius in my eyes as it is a song that instantly brings a smile to one’s face and gets people dancing. It also embodies the spirit of the class which was joyful and filled with music and laughter. As explained by one of the young women of color in the group: “Everyone felt very connected to it because it was peaceful and happy, and it really reminded us of joy.” She goes on to explain her group’s choice about using the sound of laughter throughout the piece:

We loved that our classroom felt like community and it was somewhere that also welcome laughter. This was something that was already very present in our school environment. My group members and myself walked around, recording our conversations and ridiculous stuff that we would say. We then sat down at our desks and filled the room with laughter. We realize that this aspect, though it was present, still was a joy we wanted to welcome in our school environment.

The young woman of color in this classroom really did show love for all the students in our community. If they felt someone was down or off they would ask if they were ok. They would initiate a circle and we would help problem solve or console the person who was sharing. In my 27 years of teaching I’ve never seen anything like it and it illustrates the BIPOC feminist leadership styles that these students carried. They were walking counternarratives to how leadership and students are supposed to show up in K-12 education spaces. “Cultural Intuition” and “Othermothering” were regular occurrences and speak to the healing, or as George Hartley said about the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, “Curanderas of Conquest.”[6] They created a bubble of liberation and healing through their leadership styles. And that is what BIPOC feminist leadership is–a pathway to liberation and healing through collective love. One of the students from the second student soundscape example said as much when speaking about why her group used the song “Love is the Way” by Thee Sacred Souls:

Love is the Way by Thee Sacred Souls was the song that I played when you were talking about Student voice. I did this because the way you talked about why it was important to you, reminded me of revolutionary love. When reimagining and social dreaming, you have to do it with love. It is important that when we liberate ourselves from impressive (oppressive) systems, We sent her love and we do so with love for our people of community.

As a woman of color myself, I realize in retrospect that the way this class moved cannot be explained with traditional forms of data or storytelling. In fact it feels cosmic. In Chicana Feminista praxis the term cultural intuition captures what happened in that classroom. A larger force of ancestors, families, community and stories that guided these young women of color in ways not seen in many classroom spaces. From my lens, their movements were like a freestyle jazz scat or hip hop rhyme. So in tuned was their way of being; their “cultural intuition” and “othermothering” was uncanny. They had strong grounding in their identities, communities and their place in the world.

The young women of color in this class brought joy and excitement to our classroom. The rest of their school day was more typical of white dominated spaces. These students, while in love with learning, were not immune to the racial battle fatigue experienced by many women of color. In most classrooms, conformity was the norm and suggestions otherwise were not welcomed. Their gift was their ability to co-create new knowledge as a way of disrupting hegemonic whiteness. I learned early on with this particular group of students that they had leadership gifts illegible through the lens of whiteness. Once legible it was hard to ignore. I felt the best course of action was to get out of their way and nurture their leadership genius.

As women of color, and as these young women of color demonstrate, leadership moves in collective, in community. I did not lead these young women; I simply got out of their way. So as educators let’s heed this gift given to us by the young women of color in our schools and support feminist leadership styles. Provide the students the space and safety to lead in their own ways that disrupt hegemonic patriarchal white leadership styles. The pathway to liberation is clear if we are willing to recognize it.

Notes

Author Biography

Carla Cariño is a high school Social Studies educator and doctoral student in Colorado. She advocates to transform learning through Ethnic Studies and liberatory teaching practices, with a particular focus on young women of color. With over 25 years of experience in K-12 education, she centers student voice, community, ancestral knowledge and critically conscious pedagogies in all aspects of education, especially the classroom. Her work is grounded in the belief that education should empower students to understand their histories, analyze systems of power and imagine more just futures.

Carla specializes in developing Ethnic Studies frameworks that center counternarratives of marginalized voices and promote critical consciousness.  She has led district and state wide professional development on liberatory pedagogies in the classroom as well as collaborated with schools and districts to design curriculum that reflects students’ lived experiences. Some of the work she is most proud of is her collaboration with the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Rap Lab, a hip hop focused art based curriculum in which students create soundscapes as a way to tell stories about their lives. Her approach blends humanizing practices with high expectations for academics and relationship building that support belonging, agency and self-awareness for students.

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