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Welcome students and colleagues, friends and family, if you have made it this far, I encourage you to stay a bit longer and read about some of my work. The writings reflect many of the thoughts that I carry with me throughout the course of a day, evening, and often times, the dreams that take hold of me while I sleep. The verses represent the inner voice in me that speaks of the past, the present, and the future. Writing is my ultimate form of expression that allows me to reflect, inspire, get well, and grow. The energy that feeds my work, I pull from themes that correspond to Mesoamerica, my ancestral place of birth, and the area I study. References to symbols of the past, deities, and natural phenomenon, dominate certain pieces, and blend with current verses of life, love, and death. I have never taken a writing class... the only "style" that exhibits my work is the one that I create from my imagination, heart, and dreams.

I’m an avid builder and horticulturalist, and so I spend a lot of my time building things and growing different types of herbs and plant food. I do not identify as an artist nor do I make art for aesthetic purposes; my work solely materializes a ritual-ceremonial or utilitarian function. The craft of working with wood I learned from my father, by watching him design and build homes throughout much of my adolescent youth. I also learned how to work with stone by watching my uncles construct brick and rock landscapes, in the wealthy neighborhoods were they labored during much of the 1980s, when construction was booming. My paternal grandpa Juan was also a craftsman, hence why all his sons became builders of some sort, and so building has always been an integral part of my family’s trade history. I learned about plant cultivation from my abuelita Mercedes on my paternal side and my abuelito Severo on my maternal side. Much of the landscaping strategies that I learned from my grandparents came with them from Mexico when they migrated to Alta California, in the early 1960s, along with my parents. A lot of the building and planting strategies that my family has implored have been in use for over 3,000 years. It is my purpose to revitalize and sustain these ancestral practices through ceremony, household building, and plant cultivation.

My fascination with building and growing food is not only familial, but also physical-skeletal (see my Physical Anthropology 101 blog), and because so, I have an admiration for the morphology of the human hand. The hand is unlike any part of the body, and because we use our hands every day, we literally take them for granted, sometimes failing to notice their full potential use. Our hands are our first weapons of choice in an attack, yet they are the first part of the body that we extend when helping or consoling someone. With our hands, we build shelter, writer letters, prepare food, and unknowingly, make love. Our hand-digit coordination is unique because it is precise, well adapted for creating, and for using and making tools. Hand-digit use coordination has been a part of our human evolutionary past since we inhabited arboreal environments, way before we developed bipedalism. When combined with tool use, the creative use of the hands has the capability of decolonizing our minds and bodies.

My inquiry into the relationship between hand-bone morphology usage and social behavior remains in the early stages. Nonetheless, some preliminary findings I modeled in a recent paper where I discuss the role of the hands, and early human tool making, in the creation of spatial wellness. The paper is published in Vol. 3 No. 4 of the International Journal of Development and Sustainability.


FIVE PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNITY IN DIVERSE LEARNING SPACES[1] IN LIGHT OF CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS


Five Principles Of Community In Diverse Learning Spaces[1] In Light of Cultural Transformations Revised and published 2/21/2013


Santiago Andres Garcia
Rio Hondo College, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences, 3600 Workman Mill Road, Whittier, CA 90601

This document hopes to outline a best practice approach to becoming culturally relevant[2] in light of cultural transformations in diverse learning spaces. The Principles of Community manifested below is thus offered as a conceptual baseline to begin the process of dialogue, engagement, and learning between students and teachers in cohesion. It honors the academic struggles of historically oppressed people in the United States[3] while considering further the contributions of all students and their home communities in an effort to: (a) cultivate the learning of young minds, (b) bring families together, and (c) build communal wellness. At the heart of the document, reciprocal knowledge systems[4] (harmony, balance, respect, reciprocity, compassion, family, community, etc.) reinforce learning and teaching strategies, and support further the revitalization of sustainable living practices in the classroom and in the home.

Principles of Community

I stand for:

I. Welcoming all students into my classroom without any preconceived notion toward their learning skills and/or competence. And in the process of student introductions and instruction, learn to identify the experiences of students as contributions in classroom learning environments. I make students aware that we as educators, mentors, and sources of inspiration value their presence as communal leaders, despite a multitude of growing pressures and demands placed on educators and spaces of learning.

II. Understanding and reflecting on my own experiences as an individual and educator, and how these match with my students. By doing so, I situate myself best to relate my own experiences with those of my students, thereby strengthening the student-teacher connection. And when those experiences do not match well, I make every effort to inspire students by providing culturally and ethnically relevant learning materials and instruction that speak to the current values of each particular student.

III. Becoming knowledgeable about the communities where my students eat, play, and live, in order to better understand the social and economic conditions that mold their growth and the sources of inspiration where they draw energies. This might mean standing in solidarity with their social, economic, and political struggles, and responding to their calls for support, even if these appear unfamiliar and threatening at first. The same appreciation would be extended to school staff and faculty and their families.

IV.  Deepening my understanding of Mother Earth in an effort to help maintain and revitalize all her natural phenomena. This means advocating the restoration of natural landscapes and the respect of all animals in line with the reality that humans and wildlife must coexist in harmony with one another or risk the destruction of our planet. Furthermore, I invest in the creation of sustainable practices in the arenas of food cultivation and consumption to rid and heal our bodies of chronic disorders and diseases.

V.    Never ceasing the attainment of knowledge or conforming to one-dimensional standards of teaching in the midst of cultural transformations, specifically now in a period when educational funding is becoming limited and certain educational policies aim to eliminate culturally relevant teaching[5]. This requires a vow to maintain a dialogue between colleagues, to engage students, and defend if need be the educational freedoms of our students and their communities, and those we set before us as educators.

Final Thoughts

This document first took the form of a revised Teaching Philosophy on the anniversary of my two years of teaching college humanities and anthropology. The text quickly took the form of a more holistic document in light of cultural transformations that considered further my teaching experiences, the feedback and narrative of students, and the anecdotes of colleagues. Rather than updating my Teaching Philosophy, I felt a need to establish some guiding principles that would encompass the learning experiences of students and their communities, the natural environment, and the love I have cultivated for learning. Moreover, this document ignites self-reflection, precious knowledge, the will to act, and transformation (the four Tezcatlipocas, see Acosta 2007). I invite all educators to begin similar processes, having mind that we are all connected through time and space in some fashion or form.


Sources

Acosta, Curtis
2007 Developing Critical Consciousness Resistance Literature in a Chicano Literature Class, English Journal, Vol. 97, No. 2, pp. 36-42.

Fuller, Alexandra
2012 Life After Wounded Knee, in National Geographic Magazine, pp. 30-67.

Brayboy, Bryan McKinley Jones
2006 Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education, in The Urban Review, Vol. 37, No. 5.

Howard, Tyrone C.
2003 Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Ingredients for Critical Teacher Reflection, Theory in Practice, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 195-202.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria
1995 Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 465-491.

Milner, Richard H. IV
2011 Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Diverse Urban Classroom, Urban Review, 43:66-89.

Romero, Augustine, Sean Arce, and Julio Cammarota
2012 A Barrio pedagogy: identity, intellectualism, activism, and academic achievement through the evolution of critically compassionate intellectualism, Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 217-233.

Powers, Jeanne M. and Tiffany R. Williams
2012 State of Outrage: Immigrant-Related Legislation and Education in Arizona, Association of Mexican-American Educators (AMAE) Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, pp. 13-21.

Sleeter, Christine E.
2011 The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies: A Research Review. National Educational Association Research  Department. Ronald D. Henderson, Director.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf



[1] In this text “Diverse Learning Spaces” encompasses all centers of learning that serve a multitude of diverse cultural groups and ethnic populations, i.e., the reservations and tribal lands of First Nation people, and historically segregated areas of the United States.
[2] See Brayboy 2006, Howard 2003, Ladson-Billings 1995, Milner 2011, Sleeter 2011, and Romero et al. 2009.
[3] See Fuller 2012 (pp. 30-67) and El Plan de Santa Barbara 1968.
[4] Forms of practice and thinking that promote healthy and positive developments among people and groups.
[5] See Powers and Williams 2012.
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