ABSTRACT
Academia Cuauhtli is a community-based out-of-school program that teaches ethnic studies to low-income third, fourth, and fifth graders. The program also provides transformational professional development for DLBE teachers around culturally revitalizing curriculum construction, student-centered instruction and building asset-based home-school relationships. Specifically, we raise teacher critical consciousness by challenging implicit biases that inform deficit ideologies about low-income Latinx communities. Our practice is centered on building trusting, collaborative relationships between teachers, families, community members, and students in what we refer to as a social architecture of authentic cariño. These are relational pedagogies that center and integrate diverse forms of care for the students. As an example of this practice, we describe how Academia Cuauhtli planned and implemented a curandera lesson that honors families’ indigenous heritages. We highlight our use of two relational strategies—pláticas and convivios—to examine how a cariño-based social architecture builds on everyone’s knowledge to support a holistic approach to student learning.
