Project POWER (Promoting Our Will through Education and Research) is a research initiative led by Dr. Louie F. Rodríguez, an FIU professor and Research Fellow at the Center for Urban Education and Innovation. Rodriguez is working with a cohort of students at Miami Edison Senior High in Little Haiti who themselves are learning to act as researchers examining their own school. Besides the students and Rodriguez, the research team includes Martin Wasserberg, Ph.D. candidate at FIU and research assistant; Ms. Valdez, the teacher on record at Edison.
Since October 2007, the research team has been engaging in an on-going dialogue about critical issues facing youth in society today. This dialogue is complimented with various action research projects aimed to critically examine issues facing young people in urban schools and communities for the purposes of devising solutions using informed, intellectually rigorous, and grass-roots methodology and pedagogy in one Miami classroom.
The classroom is comprised of twenty eleventh graders who volunteered to participate on the project ,which meets two to three times per week for about five hours. To begin the process, one of the first exercises involved a lively debate about the reasons students drop out of school. Dr. Rodríguez uses pedagogical approaches rooted in the work of Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire. Focusing on problem-posing pedagogy whereby teachers and students are encouraged to pose critical questions as evidence of deep intellectual engagement, the students in this course used the theories explored during that discussion to guide our work for the remainder of the year.
Another exercise revolved around the role of public schools in low-income communities serving historically marginalized youth The team grappled with the question, How has the school system worked for us and how has the system worked against us? Grounded in the students’ knowledge and experiences, an incredible number of testimonies and reflections emerged. It quickly became apparent that the current test-centered climate that looms the nation’s public schools provides very few opportunities for students to share about their experiences when the curriculum, student-teacher relationships and accountability has strictly revolved around preparing students for the FCAT.
As a group, we have also explored the history of educational inequality by examining the struggles facing Blacks, Latinas/os and Native Americans have throughout this nation’s history. We have also taken a look at the impact that the sub-prime housing crisis and the 2008 presidential election may have on their school and community.
One of the most significant projects is to examine the question, “What kinds of teachers do we want?” Students visit numerous classes of pre-service teachers at Florida International University. The idea is to begin to forge dialogue between high school students and their future teachers and to also explore waysthe K-12 system and universities can work creatively to improve urban schools.
To a large degree, this work is setting the foundation for building a large-scale dialogue about education as a constitutional right for youth, educators and communities who have been historically marginalized by the educational system. As Freire put it: “…the starting point for a political-pedagogical process must be precisely at the level of the people’s aspirations and dreams, their understanding of reality and their forms of action and struggle.”
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