CURRENT FOCAL CONSENSUS PROJECT

The CA Ethnic Studies Standards: AB101 & CA Department of Education Focal Disciplines of Ethnic Studies, for Students to Fulfill the CA High School Graduation Requirement.

To meet the AB101 high school graduation requirement, Ethnic Studies courses must be centered on one or more of the four core foundational disciplines of the field. Per CA Department of Education policy, all AB101 aligned Ethnic Studies courses, must be centered on one or more of the foundational Ethnic Studies disciplines which emerged from the four historically racialized groups, and which in their core forms, are: 

• Black Studies, Africana Studies, Pan African Studies, African American Studies, African Diasporic Studies
• Native American Studies, American Indian Studies, Indigenous Studies
• Chicana/o/x Studies, Xicana/o/x Studies, Latina/o/x/ Studies 
• Asian American Studies, Asian American Pacific Islander Studies, Asian/Pacific American Studies, Asian Pacific C Diasporic Studies. 

AB101 specifies “A course that does not use ethnic studies content as the primary content through which the subject is taught shall not be used to satisfy the requirement*”. Pedagogically, student-community-culturally relevant, responsive, sustaining, and regenerating forms of planning, teaching, learning, and reflecting, along with intersectional autoethnographic work, are central to teaching and learning Ethnic Studies as a high school graduation requirement.

Given the range and complexity of the field, it is important to identify key general standards of Ethnic Studies to aid in guiding and developing Ethnic Studies courses, teaching, and learning. The foundational values of Ethnic Studies are housed in the conceptual model of the “double helix” which signifies the interdependence between (A) holistic humanization and (B) critical consciousness. 

Holistic humanization includes the values of love, respect, hope, solidarity, and is based on the celebration of community cultural wealth. The values rooted in humanization and critical consciousness shape the following guiding principles for Ethnic Studies teaching and learning. Together, these are the two interwoven foundational guiding values (A-B), expressed through seven principles (1-7), that Ethnic Studies courses, units, and lessons must align with. In order to be considered an Ethnic Studies course, it must include the macro guiding values and principles of Ethnic Studies, hereby understood and established as the Ethnic Studies Standards, Academic Standards, macro-content standards, macro-skills standards of Ethnic Studies. Rooted in the guiding values of holistic humanization and critical consciousness, Ethnic Studies courses, teaching, and learning will:

1. ​Cultivate empathy, community actualization, cultural perpetuity, self-worth, self- determination, and the holistic well-being of all participants, especially Native People/s and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC). 
2. ​Celebrate and honor Native People/s of the land and communities of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, by providing a space to share their stories of struggle and resistance, triumphs through adversity, and solidarity, along with their intellectual and cultural wealth;
3. ​Center and place high value on pre-colonial, ancestral, indigenous, diasporic, familial, and marginalized knowledge;
4. ​Critique empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, anti-Asian Hate, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, xenophobia, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society;
5. Challenge imperialist/colonial hegemonic beliefs and practices on ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels;
6. ​Connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice on global and local levels to ensure a truer democracy;
7. Conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promote collective narratives of transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.