{"id":316,"date":"2020-12-11T16:53:54","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T21:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/?page_id=316"},"modified":"2020-12-16T21:33:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T02:33:59","slug":"students-at-the-center-strategies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/students-at-the-center-strategies\/","title":{"rendered":"Students at the Center &#8211; Strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>\n<h2>Identifying Oppression<\/h2>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h2>Individual Empowerment to Take Action<\/h2>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h2>Educational Campaigns<\/h2>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h2>Writing &#8211; Counterstories<\/h2>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Students at the Center provides teachers and students an opportunity to reflect on their personal experiences and<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">listen to those of others (Buras, 2015, p. 150). Participants of Students at the Center mobilize these verbal conversations into variations of literature and media to gain traction of their goal: to identify oppression and inequality and finding a voice to speak out against it (Buras 2015, p. 151). Students have found great utility in their individual and collective\u00a0 voice.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Students at the Center became a part of Douglass High School in 1998, a time in which Douglass was one of the lowest-ranked public high schools in New Orleans (Buras, 2015, p. 149). During that time the state, using its \u201caccountability plan,\u201d was trying to close Douglass (Buras, 2015, p. 149). In response members of SAC organized a campaign called \u201cQuality Education as a Civil Right\u201d (Buras, 2015, p. 149). Given media misportrayal, Douglass acquired a tainted image of a beat up place with reckless students (Buras, 2015, p. 149). However, the \u201cQuality Education as a Civil Right\u201d was a positive step in reconfiguring the shallow interpretation of Douglass (Buras, 2015, p. 149).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Given the rapid development of charter schools in New Orleans, teachers and students of the SAC feared the possibility of no longer having, what Maria Hernandez&#8211;a member of the SAC&#8211;called, \u201cthe choice of a truly public, neighborhood-based education\u201d (Buras, 2015, p. 151). So, in response to the movement of charterization, members of SAC began crafting \u201ccounterstories&#8221; (Buras, 2015, p. 151). The purpose of these writings were to stand up against \u201cdominant narratives of reform\u201d in the context of New Orleans the counterstories would more specifically \u201cchallenge white-majoritarian narratives\u201d and highlight the \u201cexperiential knowledge of people of color (Buras, 2015, p. 151). For example, SAC student, Vinnessia Shelbia, wrote about her family\u2019s experience of being homeless after Hurricane Katrina hit (Buras, 2015, p. 152). Shelbia explained that after Katrina, the prices of rent increased, forcing her family into numerous homeless shelters (Buras, 2015, p. 152). Shelbia connected her experience to the disinvestment policy makers had on public housing and education in black neighborhoods in New Orleans (Buras, 2015, p. 152). Beyond the counterstories, the dedication of SAC to relentless activism has driven the organization to produce 16 books, a newspaper called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our Voice<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, videos, and collected about $1.5 million in grants (Buras, 2009, p. 436).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The work SAC is doing is critical. Although Kalamu ya Salaam, one of the co-teachers at SAC, doesn\u2019t \u201cbelieve that we\u2019re [SAC] gonna win this one [the fight against charterization]\u201d he firmly believes that \u201cthe story is important\u201d and that \u201cwe [SAC members] have to tell our story\u201d (Buras, 2009, p. 445). The stories that are being produced are being heard, and if nothing else, they create friction to the decision makers that are seizing the public schools.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Identifying Oppression Individual Empowerment to Take Action Educational Campaigns Writing &#8211; Counterstories Students at the Center provides teachers and students an opportunity to reflect on their personal experiences and listen to those of others (Buras, 2015, p. 150). Participants of Students at the Center mobilize these verbal conversations into variations of literature and media to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1174,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-316","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1174"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-kreidy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}