Author of award-winning book, Subtractive Schooling:  U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and Leaving Children Behind:  How “Texas-style” Accountability Fails Latino Youth, Dr. Angela Valenzuela has a volume that is in press titled, Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth (New York: Teachers College Press). This latest book represents the culmination of years of work in developing a Grow Your Own - Teacher Education Institutes initiative, a key effort of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project that she directs.

Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth

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Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth represents our work and thinking within the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project.  Many thanks to the gifted Latina artist, Tanya Torres, for her permission for me to use "Cacibayagua," this symbol of a Taino goddess, as the cover for this book. It represents well what this volume conveys, namely, that growing critically conscious teachers isn't simply about creating pathways for them into the teaching profession, but also about growing consciousness—or concienticazión, as expressed by the late Paolo Freire

Here are artist Tania Torres' words about "La Cacibayagua."


 Cacibayagua
by Tanya Torres

"From Cacibayagua came the majority of
the people who settled the island."
Fray Ramón Pané

I thought the cave Cacibayagua, from which the Taínos are said to have come, might be a place of earth and river water from whose veins flows life.

Cacibayagua is earth, and she is also water.
Like the Black Virgin, she is the color of the Earth.

Water, cave, virgin goddess, like the ancient
Goddess, mother of all.

The Relación of Fray Ramon Pane

See Table of Contents here.

Leaving Children Behind: How "Texas-style" Accountability Fails Latino Youth

 I had the distinct pleasure of sharing this book—11 copies for 11 Texas State Representatives of the Committee on Public Education in the Texas State House of Representatives last session.  I shared this with them in the context of discussion of a bill that sets up a statewide task force on assessment.  I figured that they needed to know the history of assessment debates in Texas and what the evidence says and does not say about the (mis)uses of high-stakes testing.  LEAVING CHILDREN BEHIND is a multi-voiced, scholarly text that has certainly been helpful in Texas, as well as nationally, for getting a Latino/a—or people of color—perspective on high-stakes testing.
    Published in 2004, this text pulls down the curtains on assessment and unmasks the neoliberal agenda behind the push for ever greater testing of our youth. 
    At least two state representatives told me personally that they really appreciate the book and that they would read it in its entirety. 
  I asked to sit on the statewide task force convened by the governor that the bill I testified on created. It didn't happen. I'm undeterred, however, as the harmful effects of high-stakes testing are more widely known and making things right for Texas' children is always a worthwhile pursuit.

Subtractive Schooling:
U.S. Mexican Youth
& the Politics of Caring

Subtractive Schooling:  U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring won the 2000 American Educational Research Association Outstanding Book Award; honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards 2000; and the 2001 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award.
    At least for those that know me, it is obvious to them that the preoccupations that I take up in this work are deeply personal and to a great extent autobiographical—even though this three-year ethnographic case study addresses the experiences of students in a particular inner-city high school that proved to be a "natural laboratory" for the questions that I had about assimilation. 
    It addresses concerns related to assimilationist policies, practices, and ideologies, and the bearing that these have on students' identities and the quality of their relationships at school.  If you have not lived this experience, it is hard to understand it and this text, I am told, facilitates that kind of understanding.
    Former San Antonio, and now State of Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla once expressed this predicament that many Latinos and Mexican Americans can fall into:

    "I wasn't Mexican but I was Mexicana. I wasn't Americana but I was American. In Spanish, your terms meant your culture. In English, they meant your citizenship."

 I call it "subtractive schooling."