University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Developing sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence to dismantle structural racism and hegemony within my high school English classroom

(USC Thesis Other)

Developing sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence to dismantle structural racism and hegemony within my high school English classroom

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

Developing Sociopolitical Consciousness and Cultural Competence to Dismantle Structural
Racism and Hegemony Within my Highschool English Classroom
by
Shareesa Ann Bollers

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education

May 2022

(C) Copyright by Shareesa Ann Bollers 2022
All Rights Reserved

The Committee for Shareesa Ann Bollers certifies the approval of this Dissertation

Alan Green, Committee Member
Artineh Samkian, Committee Co-Chair
Julie Slayton, Committee Chair

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2022

iv

Abstract
This action research self-study examines the way I used a counter hegemonic lens to
develop my students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. This study
took place over the course of the Fall 2020 semester and Spring 2021 semester at San
Pedro Gifted Magnet Steam school where I am a high school English teacher. My
research question, in conjunction with the components of my conceptual framework,
were used to conduct in and out of the field analysis in three cycles. At the conclusion of
the study, students demonstrated a growth in their ability to apply a counter hegemonic
lens to build their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, and I
demonstrated a growth in my ability to use assistant questions to deepen students’
sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. The actions taken in this study
were all aimed toward equipping students to disrupt and dismantle hegemony and
structural racism in their lives and local settings.

v

Dedication

To my step-father, Onzie Travis, thank you for being the father we never had, and loving
my mom.

To the second generation of the Cave-Bollers tribe, I hope this work inspires you and
shows you how far you will go.

To the future Masike-Bollers tribe, I love you. Thank you for choosing me as your mom.
I hope this work has inspired you to chase after all of your dreams regardless of how
many times you fall and lose your way. There is always a victory, of some sort, on the
other side of your greatest battle.

To every teacher/educator who has inspired me along the way to keep going after my
dreams, thank you.

vi

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Jesus Christ my lord and savior, for giving me the strength,
believe and motivation to make it across the finish line.
Thank you to my committee: Dr. Julie Slayton, Dr. Artineh Samkian and Dr. Alan
Green for supporting me throughout this process. Thank you for being thought partners,
your time, feedback and resources throughout the dissertation process.
Thank you to my parents, siblings, family and friends for supporting me,
believing in me, motivating me, having this dream for me, and praying for me throughout
this process.
Last but not least, thank you to my students, for being my guiding light, my
constant motivation, and the ones who have truly made this whole process worth it. I
hope you all know that there would be no Ms. or Dr. Bollers without you. From the
beginning of my career, your well-being and future have been my biggest concern, and
serving as your teacher has been the best gift I have ever received. Thank you.

vii

Table of Contents
Abstract iv
Dedication v
Acknowledgements vi
List of Tables x
List of Figures xi
Context Statement 1
Historically Entrenched Inequity 5
Educational Genocide 5
Opportunity Gap 6
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 7
Context of the Organization 9
My Role in the Inequity 12
Before the Study 13
After the study 14
Research Question 15
Conceptual Framework 16
Evolution of Framework Structurally 18
Evolution of Self (Teacher) Pillar 20
Evolution of Pedagogical Moves Pillar 20
Evolution of Students Pillar 21
Evolution of Overarching Goal Pillar 22
Self (Teacher) Pillar 22

viii

Students Pillar 25
Pedagogical Moves Pillar 29
Liberatory Teacher Leadership 30
Counter Hegemonic Lens 31
Sociopolitical Consciousness 34
Cultural Competence 35
Critical Discourse 37
Safe and Brave Space 38
Overarching Goal Pillar 40
Research Methods 41
Participants and Settings 42
Actions 44
Data Collection and Instruments/Protocols 47
Documents and Artifacts 47
Critical Reflection 48
Observations 49
Data Analysis 50
Limitations and Delimitations 58
Credibility and Trustworthiness 60
Ethics 62
Findings 63
Research Question 1, Part 1: Establishing a Curriculum 64
Research Question 1, Part II: Enacting the Curriculum 76

ix

Research Question 1, Part III: Students’ Growth 81
Research Question 1, Part IV: My Growth 92
Conclusion 106
Afterword 107
References 114

x

List of Tables
Table1: Excerpt from Codebook 56

xi

List of Figures
Figure 1: Conceptual Framework 18

1

Context Statement
Excerpt from Journal Entry
As I sit here and type, my blood boils. Today, I will have the opportunity to
reflect on how a scholarship that I received 10 years ago has changed my life.
Participating in this reflection is voluntary, but I eagerly signed up for it—not expecting
the emotional turmoil it surged up within me. I feel like my access to higher education
has damaged my mental health, and my peace because I am now aware of how much the
world does not work for me because of my Black female immigrant identity. The
realizations make me want to yell and scream. But I know that in order to participate in
this work of disrupting the status quo in education, I have to play the game of
hegemony—proper speech, and respectful dialogue with the oppressors—to get my voice
heard.
My awareness of these stipulations, mixed in with my clenched rage that just
wants to run free, is why I believe that I need academic therapy. I oscillate between being
emotionally critical, and yet supportive of the work—such as Common Core—that has
been done to ease the struggles of historically marginalized children all over the United
States. I sometimes feel like I get lost in these two stringent worlds. But it is precisely
this separation—of the personal—and the worldly—that I hope to challenge and bring
together in my work as a scholar. I want to be able to eloquently communicate what the
literature says about racism and hegemony, and I also want to eloquently communicate
my own experiences that underscore that these two issues are breaking the backs of
people, scholars, and students of color all over the United States.
2

My intelligence is often dismissed at my workplace, and it is infuriating.
Education is supposed to be the profession where I am encouraged to think freely,
question openly, and disrupt thoughtfully. But currently, as it stands, I am not allowed to
express the deficiencies that I see in the local systems at work in my organization. Every
problem at the organization is placed on the macro governmental systems that affect
historically marginalized students. However, I want us at the local level to look at what
we can control and fix it instead of passively blaming higher powers for everything.
Unfortunately, this level of critical reflection is not happening at my organization.
Forcing it to happen often results in disciplinary actions so I guess the question that I
should be truly asking myself is what am I willing to risk in order to disrupt the current
systems in place?
And to be honest, I am ashamed of my answer.
I feel like I have chosen the easy way out, to disrupt the systems of my own
classroom, where I can do the work without a lot of push back. But I also know that
before I can demand anyone else to engage in the culturally relevant work that I am so
passionate about, I must first hold myself accountable to it and demonstrate competence
in my own classroom. I imagine myself as a fiery warrior charging toward the inequities
with my flaming arrow of wisdom, but I feel tired before I have even started, and so I
mostly stick to what keeps me from burning out, and keep my flamed words and thoughts
for the infrequent passing conversation with a colleague. But I need to do more. I know
that I have the capacity for this work precisely because of my Black female immigrant
intersectional identity. I have already survived more days and flourished in more ways
than I could have dreamed of doing. To be here, at this level of success and awareness at
3

28, tells me that although I may be tired, and although I may be weary, my bones will go
before me, and I will do this reflective and disruptive work for all my students.
So, despite my anger and frustration, I ask myself—what’s at stake in not doing
this disruptive work? And since hearing the voices of my students who have been
suppressed for centuries in this country is important, I comply. I swallow my rage,
unclasp my fists, and I turn to the pages of the literature to discuss why my experience as
a Black female immigrant educator to historically marginalized students in the United
States is valid. But yet, the loud, emotionally discontented voice in my head, which I
have now been conditioned to see as a large snarling Black dog, echoes and rages. But
alas, it must be reeled in, and trained to speak, write, and think in a language that the
oppressors are willing to read.
May 13, 2020
Educational Journey
In our first interaction in 5 years, my estranged father asked me if I had completed
my Ph.D. This conversation reminded me that my work in education has never just been
a privilege—it has been a necessity. My parents’ worldview, and mine as an extension,
has always been that “education is the key to success.” My parents believed that with an
education, my siblings and I could rise out of poverty, so they sacrificed to ensure we
attended the best schools in Guyana. Outside of my parents, my teachers have had the
most influence on my life. They showed me that teaching was a job of integrity,
generosity and love. I know firsthand how the work of my own teachers transformed my
life because the classroom was the one place I was able to partially ignore my poverty
4

because my wisdom gave me a power that transcended my lack of money. It is my hope
that I can do something similar for my students.
I enrolled in an Ed.D. program to learn how to better implement culturally
relevant pedagogy teaching practices and impart more knowledge of self, the world, and
leadership to my learners. The scholarship on culturally relevant pedagogies, critical
reflection, and socio-cultural theories that I studied during the program influenced my
worldview of teaching and helped me become a transformative teacher leader. These
three bodies of literature emphasize the need for a teacher to be reflective about the way
the hegemonic systems in the world affect each student, and they mandate that the
teacher utilizes student strengths in the classroom to help students excel in their learning.
As a result of my learning in this program, I engaged in culturally relevant pedagogy
teaching practices to emancipate my students from the hegemonic barriers they face in
the world, at least for the short time they spent in my classroom daily. I wanted to
empower my students to interrogate and question the systems of structural racism,
hegemony, power, and inequities in our country because historically marginalized
students face an opportunity gap in the United States (Noguera et al., 2015). They have
unequal access to educational and career opportunities of high caliber (Friedlaender et al.,
2014; Gorski, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2006). I wanted my students to have the language
to name and critique the systematic inequities they faced at an earlier age than I was able
to, so that they could work to dismantle these hegemonic systems that do not serve or
empower them in their own country. I knew that if their experiences were anything like
mine, they were going to come across too many situations in which their voices were
silenced and their knowledge was dismissed. I wanted to help my students reject the
5

negative perceptions about them based on their race, ethnicity, and culture that
perpetuated the opportunity gap. I intended to celebrate their racial and ethnic cultures in
the classroom. I believed that engaging in these elements of culturally relevant pedagogy
teaching practices would have helped my students develop their sociopolitical
consciousness, cultural competence, engage in critical discourse that interrogated the
systems of power in our country, and become change agents to dismantle structural
racism and hegemony. In the remainder of this section, I will first articulate how the
entrenched inequity of the opportunity gap affects the lives of historically marginalized
students. Then, I will discuss how the opportunity gap played out in my organization.
Thirdly, I will discuss how I was situated within the opportunity gap as a teacher, and I
will articulate my self-study action research question.
Historically Entrenched Inequity
Educational Genocide
The fight for quality public education for historically marginalized people in the
United States has existed since the 19
th
century. In his book, Anderson (1988) tells the
history of African-Americans fighting for public education for their children pre and post
the abolishment of slavery. Their protests eventually led to the establishment of a public
education system where Blacks were allowed to attend segregated schools (Anderson,
1988). However, the struggles for equitable access to public education for Black children
did not end at the establishment of public school systems. In fact, public schools in the
United States have continued to be a place of harm and educational genocide for
historically marginalized children for over 150 years (Heckman & Montera, 2009;
Spring, 2016).
6

Historically marginalized students in the United States have suffered from
educational genocide in the form of cultural genocide, deculturalization, forced
assimilation, and denial of education (Anderson, 1988; Bear, 2008; Spring, 2016).
Cultural genocide refers to the hegemonic practice of those with power attempting to
destroy the culture of an oppressed group. Deculturalization refers to the process of
conducting cultural genocide and then replacing that culture with the culture from the
dominant group (Spring, 2016). The establishment of assimilation schools for Native
Americans, denial of schooling for African-Americans, and the forbidding of speaking
non-English languages in schools for Latino and Asian American students are some
examples of the way that public schools in the United States have carried out educational
genocide (Anderson, 1988; Bear, 2008; Spring, 2016). These examples show that race is
the dominant factor that contributes to the historical genocide (Anderson, 1988; Bear,
2008) and a present day opportunity gap in the United States’ educational system
(Gorski, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Spring, 2016).
Opportunity Gap
The quality of public education for historically marginalized students in the
United States has always been inequitable in comparison to their White counterparts, and
it has evolved minimally ever since it was created over 150 years ago (Heckman &
Montera, 2009). There is an opportunity gap in schools in the United States because
White students are being prepared for college/careers at a disproportionately higher rate
than historically marginalized students (Noguera et al., 2015). The opportunity gap
manifests itself in lower test scores, lower advanced placement courses enrollment, lower
graduation rates and higher suspension and expulsion rates, disproportionately larger
7

class sizes, and lack of quality instruction for historically marginalized students in
comparison to their White counterpart (Flores, 2018; Friedlaender et al., 2014; Knaus &
Rogers-Ard, 2012; Noguera et al., 2015). The opportunity gap is also perpetuated by
color blindness, the inability to transcend cultural conflicts, inability to understand how
meritocracy functions, deficit mindsets, context-neutral mindsets and inequitable access
to funding and rigorous student-centered curriculum for historically marginalized
students (Friedlaender et al., 2014; Milner, 2010). These systems that perpetuate the
opportunity gap have placed the United States in an educational decline (Gorski, 2017).
The historically marginalized students and families who are most disadvantaged are often
blamed for the United States’ educational decline (Gorski, 2017). However, the focus
should instead be on the privileged people in and with power who reproduce deficit-
based educational systems that feed the opportunity gap for their own self-interest
(Ladson-Billings, 2006). Given these issues of access to an equitable education that
historically marginalized students face in schools, it is imperative that schools engage in
culturally relevant teaching practices in order to move toward providing historically
marginalized students with a more equitable education.
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
The literature uses different terms to define the idea and ideologies of culturally
relevant pedagogy. Ladson-Billings (2014), uses the term culturally relevant, Gay (2018),
uses culturally responsive, Paris and Alim (2014) use culturally sustaining, and
Camangian (2015) uses liberatory teacher leadership. I will be using culturally relevant
pedagogy as an umbrella term that incorporates the ideologies of Ladson-Billings, Gay,
and Paris and Alim and Camangian throughout this research project.
8

Culturally relevant pedagogy has the power to teach students how to transform
their society and free themselves from oppression because it provides the sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence necessary for historically marginalized students
to emancipate themselves (Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings; 2014; Paris &
Alim, 2014). Historically marginalized students often enter the classroom with
knowledge that highlights the harm they have suffered from racist educational
experiences, but they do not always possess the language to discuss these issues of race
and hegemony from a critical lens (Camangian, 2015). Culturally relevant pedagogy
helps them connect their personal racial experiences to systematic issues of race and
hegemony and develop the language to critically examine and work to dismantle
hegemonic and racial systems in their settings (Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014;
Gay, 2018; Paris & Alim, 2014).
Friedlaender et al. (2014) and Noguera et al. (2015) identify curriculum and
instruction as one of the main ways that student-centered schools use culturally relevant
pedagogy to work to close the opportunity gap for historically marginalized students. A
student-centered curriculum is a culturally relevant curriculum because it requires that
teachers engage in critical reflection with students and peers, develops their own
sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, and implement learning
experiences to develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence
(Brookfield, 2017; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). The teacher
must also be attentive to students’ academic achievement (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris &
Alim, 2014; Rodgers, 2002). A culturally relevant curriculum is empowering,
transformative, and emancipatory (Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014;
9

Paris & Alim, 2014). Through studying validating literature about themselves, and
engaging in learning experiences that develops their sociopolitical consciousness and
cultural competence, historically marginalized students learn the skills to emancipate
themselves from the oppressive deficit ideologies about their identities they come across
in school, college and the workforce (Gay, 2018; Gorski, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2004;
Santamaría, 2009). Sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence combat the
opportunity gap because they help students develop the analytical, collaborative and
communication skills that are required for college and 70% of jobs (Darling-Hammond,
2010; Friedlander et al., 2014). Developing the sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence of students of color, and teaching them how to use their voices critically
gives them a standing chance of fighting the inequities they face in their schooling from
an early age.
Context of the Organization
San Pedro High School was a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)
public school in the Local District South Division of LAUSD. San Pedro High School
was a part of a community of about 20 other schools located in the local San Pedro area.
San Pedro High School’s mission was to integrate communication, collaboration, critical
thinking, creativity, citizenship, and leadership in Common Core aligned courses that
were collaboratively designed to guide students in realizing their full potential and be
college and career ready (San Pedro High School, 2020). Sixty-six percent of students at
San Pedro High identified as Latino, 8% as Black, 3% as Asian, 2% as Filipino, 1% as
Pacific Islander, 0.6% as Native American, and 18% as White, for a total of 80.6% of
historically marginalized students (California School Dashboard, 2019). In addition to
10

those racial demographics, 4.2% of students at San Pedro High were classified as English
language learners, and 14% were identified as having a disability (California School
Dashboard, 2019). San Pedro High was the host school of six magnet schools, including
the San Pedro Gifted Magnet Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics
(STEAM) School, the main context for this self-study.
The STEAM Magnet school used a design thinking philosophy that incorporated
the principles of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics to help students
develop the skills necessary to solve real world problems (San Pedro Gifted Magnet,
2020). The school also utilized an interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum. Students
could choose from five pathways once enrolled in the program: STEAM, sport/band,
computer science, design, and an independent pathway designed by the student. Fifty-
seven percent of the gifted students at the STEAM Magnet school were recruited from
South Los Angeles and the Harbor area (J. Arteaga, personal communication, September
15, 2020; San Pedro Gifted Magnet, 2020).The application process was selective,
involved a parent application, and was available in nine languages including Spanish,
Farsi, Armenian, Russian, Filipino, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese (Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD), 2022). The diversity of the application was
represented by the STEAM Magnet school’s student population. Eighty-three percent of
the students at the STEAM Magnet school in the 2020-2021 school year identified as
Latino, Asian, Black or other, and 17% identified as White (J. Arteaga, personal
communication, September 15, 2020). The racial data for the exact percentage of each
historically marginalized race in the STEAM Magnet school was not available, therefore
there was not an opportunity to compare the disaggregated student demographics data.
11

However, based on my experience of teaching at the STEAM Magnet school for two
years, I was able to deduce that the STEAM Magnet school classes were more diverse
than the classes at San Pedro High where almost two out of three students were Latino.
This observation revealed that San Pedro STEAM Magnet, and the other magnet
programs on the campus, racially segregated the main/host school. Magnet programs
were specially designed to increase racial integration (Los Angeles Unified School
District (LAUSD), 2022) so while the STEAM Magnet accomplished its intent to being
racially diverse, seeing that it was still a part of San Pedro High School, and housed on its
campus, the STEAM Magnet actually caused a racial division within the San Pedro High
School community and classes as a whole. These considerations, and differences in racial
demographics between the STEAM Magnet and San Pedro High were important to
consider because they helped to provide context for the ways in which the opportunity
gap manifested not just at San Pedro High, but also within the STEAM Magnet, my
specific context.
The California Department of Education (CDE) defines college and career
readiness as completing rigorous coursework, passing challenging exams, or receiving a
state seal of biliteracy (California Department of Education, 2019). The CDE outlined
eight specific indicators for their career/college readiness that included college credit
courses, grade 11 Smarter Balanced summative assessments in English and mathematics,
and A-G completion. In the year 2019, only 498 out of 2398 San Pedro High students
(36%) were considered college/career ready (California School Dashboard, 2019). In
disaggregating the data, 84.6% of the career/college ready students were Asian, whereas
32.4% were Black, 30.9% of students were Latino and 47.9% were White (California
12

School Dashboard, 2019). In comparing these college/career ready numbers, it was clear
that the Asian and White students at the San Pedro High were more college/career ready
than the Latino and Black students. San Pedro High also reported a 10% decline in their
college/career readiness data from 2018-2019.
The college ready data showed that the majority of San Pedro High School’s
students were experiencing an opportunity gap in their education because they were not
college/career ready. This was problematic because San Pedro High was supposed to be
the gateway for college/career preparedness for its students. The state of California
compulsory education laws state that students aged 6—18 are expected to attend school,
unless for special egregious circumstances (Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2004). If
students are mandated to attend school until they are 18 years old, then schools should be
preparing them for college/careers. The lack of preparation for college/careers affects
students’ later life outcomes. Research underscores that college graduates make
significantly more money and have a greater chance of experiencing upward mobility
(Torpey, 2018). This problem of San Pedro High not developing college/career ready
students was important because it meant that the school was not positioning its
predominantly historically marginalized student population to break the cycle of poverty
that perpetuated throughout their community. It was essential for the organization to
address the issue of the opportunity gap so that it could begin accomplishing its mission
of developing successful college graduates and professionals.
My Role in the Inequity
At the time of the study, I was a 10
th
and 12
th
grade English teacher at San Pedro
STEAM Magnet school. As a teacher, I played a first-hand role in the perpetuation of the
13

school’s entrenched inequity of the opportunity gap because I had the most control over
the curriculum/content I taught and its implementation. These two elements are two areas
that allow teachers to demonstrate their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence, which are necessary to develop students’ academic skills and close the
opportunity gap (Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Santamaría, 2009). I have
always used my curriculum to help me deliver a more equitable instruction to my
historically marginalized students in my teaching career. More specifically, my concern
for developing my students’ literacy and sociopolitical consciousness, before, during and
after the study has been evident in the selection of texts I read with my students.
Before the Study
I came to San Pedro STEAM Magnet with cultural capital as Black female
immigrant educator and a curriculum text set that included works by prominent and
transformative historically marginalized authors such as Gloria Anzaldua, W.E.B DuBois
and Amy Tan. I used these works in my prior teaching experiences with the intention to
expose my students to authors and characters that either looked like them racially or
discussed social and cultural issues that I knew they would connect with because of their
own funds of knowledge and experiences. Although my intention behind using these
works was intended to disrupt hegemonic ideas in the literary canon, I was less aware of
the literature and theories that supported culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices.
In addition, I was less reflective of my own role in perpetuating hegemony/the
opportunity gap, and I did not use the texts to motivate my students to disrupt the status
quo. Hence, while I was already making some progress in disrupting hegemony and the
opportunity gap, I was reproducing them by not completely understanding how either
14

functioned, not knowing fully how to disrupt them in my teaching or how to teach my
students to question and work toward dismantling hegemonic ideas that reinforced the
opportunity gap in their lives and communities.
After the Study
After acquiring a deeper understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy and how
to better implement culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices, I have continued to
adapt my curriculum to include the three main components of culturally relevant
pedagogy: academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness
(Ladson-Billings, 2014), and to critically reflect on my practice with more fidelity
because to not do so is to perpetuate the same hegemonic educational genocide I was
fighting against (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015). I equip my students with the
language to name their oppressors and interrogate the systems of inequality, structural
racism and hegemony by using specific guided questions and culturally relevant texts to
support their building of sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. I used the
components of culturally relevant pedagogy, and critical reflection to help me implement
an empowering, validating, comprehensive, multidimensional, and emancipatory
curriculum (Gay, 2018; Paris & Alim, 2015). These theories helped me to better
understand how to construct and implement a culturally relevant curriculum to develop
my teaching practices and students’ and my own sociopolitical consciousness and
cultural competence. I honored my students’ culture by incorporating works from
prominent and transformative authors within their race in my curriculum. I used the same
works to develop and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence
by teaching them how to analyze and interrogate the texts from a counter hegemonic
15

perspective. Culturally relevant pedagogy demands that I not only study my students and
their culture, but I also teach my students how to see their culture as an asset in a country
that spews hatred toward them because of their brown and black complexions (Ladson-
Billings, 2014). However, I have missed some opportunities to help students develop
their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence because I was not always
critically reflective about my own positionality, identity, biases, or the impact of my
pedagogical moves on students which at times, reproduced the hegemonic ideas and
teaching practices that I was trying to disrupt within myself, my instruction and my
students.
Research Question
I drew on these experiences, my observations and critical reflections to answer the
following research question: (1) How do I create a space to support the development and
deepening of a counter hegemonic lens in students to develop and deepen their
sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence to explore structural racism and
hegemony that influences theirs and others’ individual experiences?
1
In the remainder of
this dissertation, I will discuss the conceptual framework that outlined the iterative
process of teaching and the action research cycles I engaged in, a description of my data
methods, followed by my findings and retrospective takeaways.

1
I dropped my second research question that focused on my relationship to helping my colleagues develop
and deepen their students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, and I removed all
references to the ideas that I had included in my conceptual framework that were connected to that research
question.

16

Conceptual Framework
The purpose of a conceptual framework is to demonstrate the tentative theory
about the phenomena being investigated (Maxwell, 2015). My original conceptual
framework, which guided my action research, evolved as a result of my data analysis and
new understandings of the literature that I studied outside of the field. I drew on Ladson-
Billings (1995, 2014), Gay (2018), Paris and Alim (2016) and Camangian (2015)
definitions of culturally relevant pedagogy to construct my conceptual framework.
Culturally relevant pedagogy is a theoretical model that outlines concepts and practices
for teachers of historically marginalized students to use in the classroom to help students
be academically successful (Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018, Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris
& Alim, 2014). This revised conceptual framework operationalizes culturally relevant
pedagogy and serves as my current tentative theory for how I believe my students and I
made progress and can continue progressing toward developing and deepening our
sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence and disrupting structural racism and
hegemony in our local contexts. Sociopolitical consciousness is the awareness of the
hegemonic systems and practices that are at work in the local, national, and global
settings that support those who have privilege and encourages marginalization
(Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Santamaria, 2009). Cultural competence is the
understanding and valuing of one’s own cultural experiences and the cultural experiences
of other racial groups (Ladson-Billings, 1992; Paris & Alim, 2014). Sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence are essential skills for historically marginalized
students to develop so that they can learn how to fight against the systems that oppress
them (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014).
17

This conceptual framework, which is depicted in Table 1, has four main pillars:
self (teacher), students, pedagogical moves and the overarching goal. The self (teacher)
pillar represents the actions that I engaged in/intended to engage in to ensure that I was
equipped to implement the pedagogical moves with my students. The pedagogical moves
pillar represents the actions I intended to/took to develop my students’ sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence. The students pillar represents the different
aspects of the students’ identities that I accounted for/needed to account for in my critical
reflections, and the development and implementation of my pedagogical moves. The final
component is the overarching goal that is accomplished by the other three pillars working
together to develop my students’ and my own sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence. The self (teacher) pillar, students pillar, and the pedagogical moves pillar all
influence each other. I, as represented by self (teacher), am the conduit in this conceptual
framework. Hence, I am centered and there are bidirectional arrows between me, the
pedagogical leadership moves and the students pillars showing that I critically reflect on
my pedagogical moves and the students and these other two pillars feed off of each other
through my critical reflections and pedagogical moves implementation. There are two
one directional arrows leading from the self (teacher) and students pillars to the
overarching goal because as a result of the interactions between the other three pillars of
the framework, my students and my own sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence develop and deepen to make progress toward dismantling hegemony and
structural racism. In the next section, I will briefly discuss the evolution of the structure
of the framework.

18

Figure 1
Conceptual Framework

Evolution of Framework Structurally
In my original framework, my pedagogical moves were centered because at the
time of its construction, I understood these moves to be the most important part of my
theory. Hence, I prioritized this section of my conceptual framework in the
implementation of my study. It was this focus that ultimately led to my construction and
implementation of a curriculum that centered culturally relevant pedagogy teaching
practices. As a result, my findings were predominantly written about my success in this
pillar, and the other two sections of my framework were less accounted for in my
findings. In hindsight, I now know that I made the decision to center my pedagogical
moves in my framework because I viewed them as part of my teaching identity, and I was
more comfortable wearing a teacher hat during the implementation and data collection
process. Critical reflection, for example, was something that I saw as being a part of my
19

research identity, and it was difficult for me to center and account for a part of myself
that I did not know very well. In his work, Coghlan (2019) discusses the difficulty of
action researchers wearing two different hats—one as researcher and one as a member of
their organization—and his challenges came to fruition in my project. However, through
reflecting on my process, I reconstructed my framework to display what I now believe to
be true. I believe that I, as represented by the self (teacher) section, am at the center of
my framework. My ability to critically reflect on my identity, my students’ identities, and
my pedagogical moves and take intelligent action because of my reflections is what will
ultimately lead me to make the most progress in developing and deepening my students’
and my own sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. The pedagogical
moves cannot accomplish all that they are intended to without me reflecting on them, and
internalizing how I want to improve my enactment of them within my classroom.
A second element of my conceptual framework that evolved was the way that I
now think about the importance of each part. I will only achieve the greatest possible
success by giving each section equal consideration in my implementation. Prior to
enacting my conceptual framework, I focused on what was centered, the driving force;
however, the data and my reflection have shown me that I need to hold all parts of my
framework equally and implement them with fidelity to accomplish my ultimate goal. I
think it will be easier for me to hold each part equally now that I have gone through the
research process once because I can now wear a researcher hat at the same time that I am
wearing a teacher hat and process and critically reflect from both perspectives. In
addition, I have now merged my identities by making critical reflection a part of my
practice and teacher identity, so it is no longer reserved for the researcher part of my
20

identity. Now that I have discussed the evolution of the overarching framework, in the
section below, I will discuss specific changes that I made in each pillar.
Evolution of Self (Teacher) Pillar
For self (teacher) the only essential act that I now believe I need to take explicitly
to accomplish my learning outcome is to critically reflect on my identity, and pedagogical
moves from multiple perspectives, and my positionality in relation to my students
(Brookfield, 2010). In doing so, I believe that I will critically reflect on all the areas that
are needed for my personal growth and accomplishing the overarching goal of the study.
Before, I had also named interrogating students' identities, and internalizing my
pedagogical moves as additional actions that I needed to take to develop as a teacher, but
these actions were a part of the content that I was critically reflecting on so it was
repetitive to have them delineated individually. I have also since explicitly identified my
own identity, positionality, and biases as important areas that I also need to use critical
reflections to unearth during future cycles of inquiry. To help historically marginalized
students achieve academic success, a teacher must build and develop their own
sociopolitical consciousness (positionality and biases) and cultural competence (identity)
(Ladson-Billings, 1995).
Evolution of Pedagogical Moves Pillar
Prior to the study, I identified four pedagogical moves that I intended to carry out
to accomplish my goal of developing my students’ and my own sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence to disrupt hegemony and systematic racism in our
lives and communities. These moves were: reframe learners’ thinking about
race/ethnicity and culture using a counter hegemonic lens, engage in critical discourse
21

within learner’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), incorporate culturally relevant
pedagogy teaching practices, and create a safe and brave space. During the study, I
identified engaging in liberatory teacher leadership as a pedagogical move that I used so I
merged reframing learners’ thinking from a counter hegemonic lens with this new
pedagogical move because reframing from a counter hegemonic lens is a practice of
liberatory teacher leadership. Liberatory teacher leadership is a culturally relevant
pedagogy teaching practice, and it is the practice of being honest about the historical and
material contradictions that have created the social conditions impacting oppressed
communities throughout the world and fostering opportunities for students to interpret
and discuss relevant actions that might lead to transformative change (Brookfield, 2010;
Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). I also deleted
incorporating culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices as a pedagogical move
because it was the type of pedagogical moves that I used in my study and not a
pedagogical move. As a result of these changes, there are only three culturally relevant
pedagogy teaching practices/pedagogical moves in my framework: engage in liberatory
teacher leadership, engage in critical discourse within learner’s ZPD, and create a safe
and brave space.
Evolution of Students Pillar
I added my students’ biases, positionality, and level of cultural competence as
explicit elements that are essential for me to critically reflect on, and use the knowledge
to inform the implementation of my pedagogical moves. I made these concepts explicit
because I have to come to understand the role they play in my theory of action. In
addition, I clearly delineated the elements that I believe are central to my students’ social
22

identities versus academic identities, and I will be analyzing these two identities
separately in my framework.
Evolution of Overarching Goal Pillar
Finally, I edited the overarching goal to equally represent sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence, instead of sociopolitical consciousness only, in
my new conceptual framework. In the section below I will discuss each pillar of the
framework and the concepts/literature that informed them, their connection to culturally
relevant pedagogy, and what I achieved in each pillar in my implementation of my study.
Self (Teacher) Pillar
I came through a culturally relevant pedagogy and critical reflection lens in the
construction of the self (teacher) pillar in my conceptual framework. Critical reflection,
which framed the self (teacher) column was an essential act to accomplish the
development of sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence because Ladson-
Billings (1995) writes that a teacher must build their own sociopolitical consciousness
and cultural competence in order to push students toward greater academic achievement.
In order to examine their relationship to hegemonic practices and their valuing of theirs
and others’ culture, a teacher must be reflective (Brookfield, 2010). From the outset,
critical reflection was the self-development tool that I identified as most essential to
analyze my identity, my teaching practices, and students’ identities to make progress
toward taking informed action to dismantle structural racism and hegemony. Critical
reflection is a reflective tool and practice that can lead educators toward uncovering
hegemony, becoming more aware of the racial dynamics that permeate our professional
practice, and creating a classroom culture that utilizes feedback from colleagues and
23

students (Brookfield, 2010; Hoban & Hastings, 2006; Larrivee, 2008; Rodgers, 2002). I
used critical reflection to investigate my own development of sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence, the ways that I sustained and deviated from
hegemonic educational practices as a teacher, the progress that I made toward
dismantling structural racism and hegemony, and how I utilized pedagogy to push my
students toward doing the same.
Unfortunately, I did not use critical reflections effectively enough in the field to
help me investigate my own identity, my positionality in relation to my students and the
quality of my pedagogical moves. Most of the critical reflections that I conducted in the
field ended up being descriptive or comparative (Jay & Johnson, 2002), missing an
opportunity to deeply analyze my identity, positionality, and biases in ways that were
necessary for my project. I also did not solicit feedback from students about how the
learning moves helped them develop sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence to dismantle structural racism and hegemony. Brookfield (2010) Hoban and
Hastings (2006) and Rodgers (2002) emphasize the importance of teachers getting
students’ perspective on their classroom experiences. Engaging students in scaffolded
journaling would have provided information about how they were making sense of the
curriculum I was implementing. These journals would have also indicated the students’
progress toward developing sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence on a
more consistent basis. The feedback that I received from the students, combined with my
own critical reflections, would have helped me interrogate my students’ and my own
identity, ways of knowing, and prior knowledge in and out of the field. In the field, I
predominantly reacted to my actions instead of reflecting on my actions (Schön, 1991).
24

However, despite not using critical reflection with the level of fidelity that I intended
because of what I learned once outside of the field, I still contend that it is and was an
essential component of my conceptual framework.
With the help of my committee chair, I critically reflected more intentionally, in
between cycles, and once I left the field. Critical reflection is most effective when it
involves multiple perspectives (Brookfield, 2010; Hoban & Hastings, 2006; Larrivee,
2008), and this was proven to be true as my ability to critically reflect improved once I
involved my committee chair in the reflection process. Through our conversations, and
writing reflective memos, I was able to make progress toward analyzing my data and
seeing my students and myself more clearly. Rodgers (2002) discusses the importance of
teachers slowing down and being present in the classroom to make note of what students
are actually learning. Presence is the ability for a teacher or leader to slow down, notice
the difference between what students are learning versus what they are teaching, while
also being aware of their students’ emotional capacity (Heifetz et al., 2009; Rodgers,
2002). Engaging in Rodgers’s reflective cycle of seeing my students, describing what was
actually happening without interpretation from multiple perspectives and using the
knowledge gained to make intelligent action would have allowed for a more thorough
reflective process as I assessed my own self-development and teaching practices in the
classroom. Intelligent action is the experimentation that occurs after a teacher has
observed, taken thorough descriptive notes, and analyzed the various moments in the
classroom before intervening and implementing pedagogical moves (Heifetz et al., 2009;
Rodgers, 2002). I would have been better able to articulate what my students were taking
away from the content if I was more present in the classroom, and I would have been
25

better situated to engage in intelligent action that addressed the problem of how
hegemony and structural racism sustains the opportunity gap. As a result of the power of
the critical reflection process, I am confident that it still belongs in my conceptual
framework. I expect to expand upon in the future to further disrupt hegemonic ideas in
my students, myself, and my curriculum. In the next section, I will discuss my students'
pillar, and the specific aspects of their identities that informed the self (teacher) and
pedagogical moves pillar.
Students Pillar
I came through a culturally relevant pedagogy lens when constructing my students
pillar in my framework. This pillar accounted for students’ social identity: funds of
knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), and ways of knowing, positionality and biases (Drago-
Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017). This pillar also accounted for students’
academic identity: ZPD, cognitive strategies, prior inside of school knowledge (Tharp &
Gallimore, 1998), zone of emotional disequilibrium (Heifetz et al., 2009; Ormrod et al.,
2014), and learners’ preferences/choices (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Morell & Duncan-
Andrade, 2002; Santamaría, 2009). My students' interaction with the pedagogical moves
that I implemented and the way that I accounted for students in my critical reflections
were dependent on their academic and social identities. Accounting for these essential
elements of students' social and academic identities was evidence of me engaging in
care—both aesthetic and authentic care, and as a result, engaging in culturally relevant
pedagogy. Authentic care is caring for a student holistically, and it requires a teacher to
get to know their students’ learning preferences, cultural practices that they bring to the
classroom and planning to ensure that the curriculum will meet students’ academic needs
26

and productively push them toward growth (Valenzuela, 1999). Aesthetic care is the sole
concern for the academic aspects of students’ identity regardless of their emotional ability
(Noddings, 1988). In order to serve the students’ needs academically and socio-
emotionally, a teacher must include both forms of care in their practice. I was informed
by all of these culturally relevant pedagogy concepts in constructing my learner pillar.
Some of the literature connected with Ladson-Billings (1995, 2004) ideas of culturally
relevant pedagogy directly, and some of the literature extended her ideas. In order to
provide a fuller understanding of my student pillar, I will discuss each aspect of my
students’ social and academic identity individually, the literature that underscored their
relevance and importance in more detail, and discuss how I took up these various
elements in my study in the section below.
Social Identity
I drew on Moll et al. (1992) to account for students' funds of knowledge, which is
their outside of school knowledge. Students’ funds of knowledge give a teacher insight
into students' ways of knowing, positionality, and biases because it reveals students’
cultural and non-academic knowledge (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017; Gay,
2018; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Moll et al. 1992; Santamaría, 2009). Many historically
marginalized students’ funds of knowledge are unacknowledged within the classroom,
and they are instead perceived as empty vessels needed to be filled. This lack of
validation of historically marginalized students’ culture creates missed opportunities for
teachers to push students toward academic achievement because using students’ culture
as a basis for learning is a gateway for deeper learning (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Morell &
Duncan-Andrade, 2002). I used journals, critical discourse, and assignments that focused
27

on students’ identities to learn more about students’ funds of knowledge, and I also often
asked students to share these aspects of their identities with each other.
Each student comes to the learning space with a different orientation and
understanding of sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence and needs
different resources to push them toward applying a counter hegemonic lens to disrupt
hegemony and structural racism (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017). These four
sociopolitical orientations are called ways of knowing (Drago-Severson & Blum-
DeStefano, 2017). Knowing students’ ways of knowing reveals their ability to apply a
counter hegemonic lens to sociopolitical and cultural issues, how they view themselves in
comparison to others (their positionality), and their biases. I used critical discourse,
journals, and assignments to discover students’ ways of knowing during my study. Once I
was able to identify these social elements of students’ identities, I was able to apply the
scaffolds needed to support students’ development of their academic identity. Students’
sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence are gateways for their overall
academic success (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014).
Academic Identity
I drew on Tharp and Gallimore (1998) to account for students’ zone of proximal
development, prior inside of school knowledge and cognitive strategies to push them
toward deeper learning. Zone of proximal development is the distance between where
each learner is cognitively and the point of development or learning goal that the teacher
would like them to achieve (Tharp & Gallimore, 1998). Identifying students’ zone of
proximal development helped me implement the appropriate cognitive strategies to get
them to a place where they could safely reflect, unlearn, reframe their knowledge from a
28

counter hegemonic perspective, and take intelligent sociopolitically conscious and
culturally competent action. Tharp and Gallimore (1998) identified several ways I could
push students toward doing rigorous work within their zone of proximal development
(ZPD). In my study, I predominantly utilized assistant questions, modeling, and cognitive
structuring to interrogate the gap between my students’ prior knowledge of sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence and my determination to get them to apply a
counter hegemonic lens to disrupt hegemony and structural racism. Students’ learning
and academic success are an essential element of Ladson-Billings (1995) culturally
relevant pedagogy so focusing on students' ZPD and cognitive strategies to push them
toward deeper learning was essential in order to operate under a culturally relevant
pedagogy framework in my study.
Given that the work that I was doing in the classroom was disruptive, in addition
to students’ ZPD, I also needed to plan for their zone of emotional disequilibrium.
The zone of emotional disequilibrium is the capacity for an individual to engage in
adaptive change and still be able to function productively in their everyday tasks (Heifetz
et al., 2009; Ormrod et al., 2014). I defined the zone of emotional disequilibrium as the
spectrum of discomfort in which I could productively push each student emotionally and
cognitively to engage in dismantling dominant ideologies. Planning for students’ zone of
emotional disequilibrium was an act of care and culturally relevant pedagogy because it
prepared me to consider the right academic (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Noddings, 1998;
Tharp & Gallimore, 1998) and socioemotional/sociocultural strategies (Heifetz et al.,
2009; Moll et al.,1992; Ormrod et al., 2014; Valenzuela, 1999) to connect with students,
and help them achieve deeper learning. However, despite accounting for students' zone of
29

emotional disequilibrium in the conceptual framework, during the study, I focused too
heavily on building my students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence
without regarding where they were emotionally. My inability to recognize my students’
zone of disequilibrium interfered with my own productivity.
I drew on Ladson-Billings (2014) and Santamaría (2009) to account for students'
preferences for learning. Each student brought their own unique preferences for how to
engage in learning to the classroom. I defined a students’ preference as the method or
medium that learners, consciously or subconsciously, prefer to interact with new material.
I am not referencing the myth of learning styles. Some students consciously chose to
learn from videos, while others chose small groups, role-playing, independent work, or
real-life application scenarios. I catered to students’ need for choice in their learning by
always giving students several different options and mediums to present their work in
summative and formative assignments. Accounting for the different preferences for
engaging in new material that each learner brought to the classroom was an act of
culturally relevant teaching because I was considering the learner from a holistic
perspective, and accounting for their academic individuality and student choice (Ladson-
Billings, 2014; Morell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002; Santamaría, 2009). In the next section,
I will discuss the third component of my conceptual framework, the pedagogical moves
that I implemented as a result of my students pillar and self (teacher) pillar.
Pedagogical Moves Pillar
I came through a culturally relevant perspective when selecting pedagogical
moves to accomplish the overarching goal of building my students’ and my sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence, and aid in our making progress toward
30

dismantling hegemonic systems. I selected three culturally relevant pedagogy teaching
practices/pedagogical moves (liberatory teacher leadership, critical discourse, and brave
and safe space) that I believed would help my learners and I accomplish our goals within
the study. The self (teacher) and student pillars influenced these pedagogical moves, and
their implementation. The culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices/pedagogical
moves I implemented were dependent on me getting to know my students' identities in
depth (students pillar) (Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Moll et al.,
1992; Santamaría, 2009) and engaging in critical reflection to analyze the information I
learned about their identities extensively self (teacher) pillar (Brookfield, 2010, Ladson-
Billings, 2014, Rodgers, 2002). Using culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices in
my study helped me to consider all aspects of my learners’ prior academic and social
knowledge as I planned and implemented my curriculum (Milner, 2010). Consistent with
my definition of culturally relevant pedagogy, these culturally relevant pedagogy
teaching practices/pedagogical moves ensured that my students were academically
successful, culturally competent, and sociopolitically conscious to disrupt the status quo
(Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). This section of my
conceptual framework was my primary focus during the implementation of my study, and
it was where students and I had the most traction and growth in my project. In the next
section, I will discuss the three culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices that I used
as pedagogical moves in my study.
Liberatory Teacher Leadership
One culturally relevant teaching pedagogy teaching practice/pedagogical move
that I used in my study was liberatory teacher leadership. As I defined earlier, liberatory
31

teacher leadership fosters a culturally relevant and liberatory learning environment by
being honest about the historical and material contradictions that have created the social
conditions impacting students and oppressed communities throughout the world, and
creating opportunities for students to interpret and discuss relevant actions that might lead
to transformative change for themselves and their communities (Brookfield, 2010;
Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). I named
liberatory teacher leadership as a culturally relevant pedagogy teaching
practice/pedagogical move as an essential part of my study once I was outside of the field
and reflected on my teaching experience. Liberatory teacher leadership is a culturally
relevant teaching practice because it develops students’ sociopolitical consciousness and
cultural competence, two tenets of Ladson-Billings’ (1995) theoretical model of
culturally relevant pedagogy, and it also develops students’ ability to apply a counter
hegemonic lens (Camangian, 2915). I enacted liberatory teacher leadership in the
classroom by focusing on the development and deepening of my students’ ability to use a
counter hegemonic lens to build their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence. I will discuss these three subparts (counter hegemonic lens, sociopolitical
consciousness, and cultural competence) of this culturally relevant pedagogy teaching
practice/pedagogical move next.
Counter Hegemonic Lens. One of the first aspects of liberatory teacher
leadership I engaged in was to develop students’ ability to apply a counter hegemonic
lens. Counter hegemonic lens was both a liberatory teacher leadership move that I
enacted, and a tool that I used with students to help them internalize content. A counter
hegemonic lens is a pedagogical move that equips students to view the world from a
32

perspective where historically marginalized perspectives and experiences are valued
(Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). It is
also a tool that equips students to acquire the sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence needed to take intelligent action toward interrogating and dismantling
oppressive dominant White ideologies and hegemony (Brookfield, 2010; Ladson-
Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014; Rodgers, 2002). It helps students to be
sociopolitically conscious and aware of their positionality and relation to hegemony
because it reveals the hegemonic systems and practices that marginalize them and other
racial groups (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Santamaría,
2009). It also helps students to be culturally competent because it unearths the hegemony
within their culture and the cultures of other historically marginalized races (Camangian,
2015; Paris & Alim, 2014). Hegemony refers to the process whereby ideas, structures,
and actions intended to protect the status quo are accepted as natural, pre-ordained, and
working for the common good of all (Brookfield, 2010). Simply put, hegemony is the
preservation of White power and privilege. Teachers make progress toward liberating
students from the bind of hegemonic ideals and raise students’ sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence through using a counter hegemonic lens.
To develop students’ ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens, I engaged in a
multi-step process to reframe students’ thinking. First, I interrogated where every student
was in their ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens. I was able to determine where
each student was in the development of their counter hegemonic lens through exploring
their identities. Second, I provided clear definitions and examples of hegemony, and
helped students understand that every system that oppresses historically marginalized
33

students exists because of hegemony. Developing students’ counter hegemonic lens also
entailed teaching them to notice how hegemony oppresses historically marginalized
people daily in our society and teaching them to notice, name, reflect on, and replace
deficit or oppressive thinking toward historically marginalized people with asset-based
language that does not normalize hegemony. These actions were consistent with
determining where students' ZPD were, an important aspect of students’ academic
identity that I accounted for in the students pillar.
For my students, the evidence of learning for this move was their verbal and
written articulation of how they learned to develop and apply a counter hegemonic lens to
reframe their thoughts, verbal and written evidence of them applying a counter
hegemonic lens and reframing their thoughts, and also their encouragement to others to
do the same in peer interactions. Learners should have also been able to call upon each
other and me to reframe our thinking when they heard hegemonic ideologies being used
to oppress people of color. This behavior occurred at times within my study, but it was
inconsistent. To accomplish these acts, I also needed to deepen students’ sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence so that they had the acquired knowledge to notice
the different nuances and perspectives of hegemony.
For me, the evidence of learning for this learning move was my continued work
of trying to teach my students and myself how to reframe from a counter hegemonic lens,
being aware of when dominant ideologies were present in my students’ and my own
comments and calling said hegemonic ideas out actively, and encouraging reflection
through verbal or written discourse. Like every other practice in this conceptual
framework, the act of developing students' ability to apply a counter-hegemonic lens and
34

the collecting of evidence of learning was a continuous process, and the process
improved with reflection on my pedagogical moves and students’ identities.
Sociopolitical Consciousness. A second aspect of liberatory teacher leadership
that I enacted in my study was sociopolitical consciousness. As previously defined,
sociopolitical consciousness is the awareness and understanding of the hegemonic
systems and practices that are at work in the local setting, nation, and globe (Ladson-
Billings, 2004; Santamaría, 2009). It is also the understanding of how the systems of our
world work to support privilege and oppress others who have been historically
marginalized (Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2004). To be sociopolitically
conscious, one must also be aware of their own positionality with hegemony (Brookfield,
2010, Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). Learners only develop sociopolitical
consciousness if they are pushed to read, write, reflect, and engage in critical discourse
about the hegemonic systems and practices that marginalize them and other racial groups
from a counter hegemonic lens (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings,
2014; Paris & Alim, 2014; Rodgers, 2002; Santamaría, 2009). I aimed to develop my
students’ sociopolitical consciousness in my classroom by asking them to read and
discuss literature written by historically marginalized people and current events that also
affected them. Through consistent critical discourse students were able to make some
progress in being able to eloquently discuss sociopolitical issues from a counter
hegemonic lens and consider their own relationship in reproducing hegemonic ideas.
Students who developed and deepened their sociopolitical consciousness questioned the
system, articulated their positionality within the system, strategized how to disrupt the
system and engaged in intelligent action. Developing students’ sociopolitical
35

consciousness helped students to see beyond the mundaneness of schoolwork and instead
understand why and how their lives depended on them becoming more knowledgeable
about the world and its hegemonic beliefs (Camangian, 2015). I predominantly used the
texts, and themes in my curriculum, classroom discourse and current events to develop
students’ sociopolitical consciousness. My sociopolitical consciousness developed by
planning, implementing, and reflecting on my implementation of the curriculum, and
these actions served as my evidence of learning.
Cultural Competence. The third indicator of liberatory teacher leadership that I
enacted in my study was cultural competence. As previously defined, cultural
competence is the understanding and valuing of one’s own cultural values and
experiences and the cultural values and experiences of other racial groups (Ladson-
Billings, 1992; Paris & Alim, 2014). By becoming culturally competent, students are able
to appreciate and value those cultures in spite of their hegemonic influences (Camangian,
2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). A counter hegemonic lens helps
students to unearth the hegemony within their culture and the cultures of other
historically marginalized races by analyzing and comparing and contrasting those cultural
experiences (Camangian, 2015; Paris & Alim, 2014). Paris and Alim (2014) argue that
culture, especially youth culture, does not stay within racial lines. Youth culture is a
mélange of multiple cultures. Thus, to implement cultural competence
effectively, teachers must facilitate the study of multiple cultures, races, religions, and
gender identities in their courses and critically analyze them from local and global
perspectives. Cultural competence problematizes all cultural elements that support
hegemony from a racial, religious, or gendered perspective. Paris and Alim (2014)
36

highlight the importance of problematizing and reframing any intolerant cultural ideas
that historically marginalized students might bring to the classroom about their own
culture or other cultures because otherwise, these students would simply be perpetuating
hegemony. Hence, when learners enter the classroom with ideas that are in support of the
status quo, these ideas need to be challenged and unlearned, and a counter hegemonic
lens helps to accomplish this unlearning and unearthing (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian,
2015). Cultural competence is intended to emancipate historically marginalized students,
not pacify them (Gay, 2018; Paris & Alim, 2014; Santamaría, 2009).
A teacher must be culturally competent and actively work to develop their own
cultural competence to push learners toward deeper cultural competence (Ladson-
Billings, 2014). Cultural competence was an area that I was still developing during my
study and given the fact that I was not sufficiently critically reflective about my own
identity, positionality, and biases in the study, I was less equipped to push students
toward doing the same, and students only demonstrated some development in their
cultural competence. I enacted cultural competence in the classroom by using students’
culture as a basis for learning, articulated that culture is fluid, positioned students to study
culture from a historical perspective, and problematized cultural practices that sustained
dominant ideologies (Ladson-Billings, 2004; Paris & Alim, 2014). Students demonstrated
a development and deepening of their cultural competence by challenging each other’s
idea, reflecting on how their ideas might be problematic, and appreciating and value their
cultures and the cultures of others despite their hegemonic influences (Camangian, 2015;
Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). Developing students’ cultural competence
also helped to deepen their sociopolitical consciousness because they became more aware
37

and empathetic since cultural competence exposed them to numerous sociopolitical issues
outside of their own race, culture and ethnicity. In the next section, I will discuss the
other two culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practices/pedagogical moves that were a
part of my study.
Critical Discourse
A second pedagogical move that I engaged in during my study was critical
discourse. Critical discourse is present in discussions that question, interrogate, and use
credible evidence to support a given idea or opinion (Camangian, 2015; Morell &
Duncan-Andrade, 2002). Critical discourse helps to uncover hegemonic and racist
assumptions that we have about the world and frees learners from constraining ways of
thinking (Brookfield, 2010). To participate in critical discourse, students must develop
their ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to sociopolitical and cultural topics.
Engaging students in critical discourse was both a pedagogical move I used to develop
their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, and evidence of learning for
how students were progressing in the development of their sociopolitical consciousness
and cultural competence.
Each student needed different scaffolding methods to push them toward deeper
critical thinking during critical discourse. Hence, it was essential that I considered each
student’s academic and social identities when utilizing assistive means to help them
digest and critically analyze their new learning. Students’ growth in engaging in critical
discourse looked like students citing credible evidence to support their opinions from
sources they read, connecting that evidence to their own cultural experiences or the
cultural experiences of others, and interrogating their knowledge from a counter
38

hegemonic lens. In addition, students also connected the content being discussed in class,
and their life experiences to broader themes such as race, hegemony, power, oppression,
the opportunity gap, and activism.
There was a direct relationship between the pedagogical moves, the students’
identities and experiences, and my ability to internalize their identities and learning
preferences. Evidence of my learning was my constant evaluation and revising of the
discussion methods that I was implementing to facilitate critical discourse amongst my
learners. My creation of structures to encourage learners to converse with each other and
not solely me was also additional type of evidence that demonstrated I was implementing
critical discourse in a way that supported my students’ unlearning of oppressive and
racist ideologies to dismantle hegemony in their lives and communities.
Safe and Brave Space
A third pedagogical move that I identified in my original framework was creating
a brave and safe space. The work of unlearning, critiquing, and dismantling dominant
ideologies is difficult and emotional because it disrupts your worldview (Brookfield,
2010; Heifetz et al., 2009, Ormrod et al., 2020). This is the reason that I accounted for the
student's zone of emotional disequilibrium in the student pillar. It is an act of care
(authentic and aesthetic) to plan for students’ discomfort and have strategies in place to
address those discomforts (Noddings, 1988, Valenzuela, 1999). I defined a safe space as
an environment that encouraged vulnerability and critical thinking. In a safe space,
students critique hegemonic ideas and behaviors that need to be unlearned, and engage in
critical dialogue and reflection to make those improvements (Brookfield, 2010; Heifetz et
al., 2009, Howard, 2003). I defined a brave space as an environment with shared
39

authority where students question their own ideas, and respectfully challenge their peers’
thoughts. In a brave space, learners admit to not knowing everything, own up to mistakes
and are willing to learn and unlearn (Brookfield, 2010; Drago-Severson & Blum-
DeStefano, 2019; Heifetz et al., 2009; Howard, 2003; Ormrod et al., 2020; Rodgers,
2002). Even in a brave space, racist and otherwise dominant and degrading ideologies
should not be expressed or tolerated. It was my responsibility to create a classroom
climate where students were able to try and fail and emotionally and academically
process their new learning about hegemony, sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence.
I created a safe space by asking students assistant questions that challenged their
hegemonic point of views, giving students’ assignments that asked them to reflect on
their worldview, and using texts that challenged students’ prior knowledge about
historically marginalized people’s history and culture, and sharing with students my
worldview and expectations for a classroom that honored historically marginalized
people and was not xenophobic. Evidence of a brave space was first, my students and I
owing our mistakes of internalizing and reciprocating dominant deficit ideologies of
historically marginalized people and identifying specific steps that we could take to not
fall trap to reproducing hegemony. Secondly, we corrected each other’s comments and
ideas that were racist and supportive of hegemony. Thirdly, my students and I asked each
other questions that challenged our ideas of power, race, and positionality. Creating a
brave and safe space required knowing each student and their life experiences in greater
depth, and it takes time to know students well. Hence, although I did achieve some
40

success in this area of my theory, it remains an area that I want to continue to explore to a
greater extent because I want to continue to improve my classroom climate.
Overarching Goal Pillar
The fourth pillar of my conceptual framework was the overarching goal for my
students and I to be equipped to take action against hegemony and racism in our context
as a result of the study and the interaction of the other three pillars. Everything in this
conceptual framework was aimed toward pushing my students and me toward developing
sociopolitical consciousness, cultural competence, and taking specific actions to
dismantle hegemony and structural racism. As I noted earlier, sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence are essential skills for historically marginalized
students to develop so that they can learn how to fight against the systems that oppress
them (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014). If students never
learned of hegemony and how to fight it, then they would have continued to be victims of
the systems that nurtured the opportunity gap in the United States. For my students, this
meant being able to talk about their histories, the things that have shaped their identities,
and identifying specific areas in their communities that they can take intelligent action.
This looked like them speaking up more in class to push back on deficit thinking ideas or
misrepresentations of minority cultures and analyzing how systems were inherently
oppressive and racist and sharing this information publicly in class.
Developing sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence required critical
reflection, and a consistent drive for improvement on my part. It also required honoring
my students and everything that they brought to the table—either to validate and affirm—
or to problematize and encourage reframing (Camangian, 2015; Moll et al., 1992; Paris &
41

Alim, 2014.) Through personal development and getting to know my students, I was able
to implement the pedagogical moves that provided my students with a more equitable
education that helped close the opportunity gap. I see this entire conceptual framework
and dissertation as one small act that I took to further develop my teaching practices and
deepen my learners’ sociopolitical knowledge and cultural competence. I believed that I
could make progress toward ensuring more equitable systems in my educational context
through using the knowledge of critical reflection, and culturally relevant pedagogy.
These combined acts led to the development and enactment of sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence through unlearning structural racism and
dismantling hegemony.
I will outline my methods for accomplishing the learning outcomes I outlined in
this conceptual framework in the next component of this dissertation.
Research Methods
This section will describe the qualitative approach, instrumentation, and data
collection methodologies that I used to conduct this study. The purpose of this study was
to examine how I used culturally relevant pedagogy and critical reflection to create an
educational space where my students and I developed our sociopolitical consciousness
and cultural competence and worked toward dismantling structural racism and hegemony
in our local settings. I will analyze how I enacted specific pedagogical moves in my
classroom with my 10
th
and 12
th
grade students. This research sought to answer one
question: How do I create a space to support the development and deepening of a counter
hegemonic lens in students to deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence to explore structural racism and hegemony that influences theirs and others
42

individual experiences? The answers to this question came from an iterative and
collaborative process between students and me as I engaged in and implemented the self
and pedagogical moves outlined in my conceptual framework.
Participants and Settings
In this section, I present the participants with whom and settings in which this
action research study took place. I engaged in purposeful sampling in this study. In
purposeful sampling, the researcher identifies the characteristics of a population of
interest and then tries to locate individuals who the researcher specifies have those
characteristics (Johnson & Christensen, 2014). A self-study necessitated that I utilized
purposeful sampling to study myself in my own setting. A lot of the study took place in
my virtual classroom in Zoom as I studied my interactions with my students. I conducted
the study during my first year in a new teaching setting, so I did not know my participants
personally.
Participants
The San Pedro Gifted Magnet STEAM School is a part of San Pedro High
School. The students at the two schools share the same building, school leadership, and
extracurricular activities; however, they follow a different academic program. The
students in the STEAM Magnet school follow an interdisciplinary curriculum that
incorporates project-based learning (PBL) and STEAM principles into their learning. The
purpose of the magnet school curriculum is to provide students with an integrated
educational experience that removes racial isolation in students’ schooling and equips
students with the skills to perform well in a diverse society (San Pedro STEAM Magnet
School, 2020). Students’ parents applied to the program on their behalf. Students were
43

also recruited from all over Los Angeles, specifically South Los Angeles, to be a part of
the magnet program.
At the beginning of the study, I included one section of my 12
th
Grade Honors and
one section of my 10
th
Grade Honors students in the study. However, after my second
data collection cycle, I decided to only focus on my 10
th
grade students because I had
more agency over the curriculum for that course. My 12
th
grade course was Advanced
Composition whilst my 10
th
grade course was a general, open-ended English course that I
was allowed to teach whatever curriculum and content I deemed best. Of the 30 students
in my 10
th
class, 20 were Latino, 5 were Asian, 2 were Pacific Islanders, 2 were White
and 1 was Black. My students’ ways of knowing ranged from instrumental knowers to
self-authoring knowers. However, the majority of them fell under socializing knowers
because a vast majority of them formed their opinions and beliefs through interactions
with their peers, teachers and families (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2017). I
engaged my students in building their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence by asking them to use current sociopolitical events such as the Black Lives
Matter movement, the upcoming November presidential elections and national holidays
as the basis for their development. I used guided journals, culturally relevant pedagogy
teaching practices, and the practice of reading, analyzing, and making personal, textual
and real-world connections to texts written by historically marginalized people that
tackled structural racism to help students grow their sociopolitical consciousness, cultural
competence, and their capacity to disrupt hegemony.

44

Settings of Actions
Due to COVID-19, all of my actions with students took place in a virtual setting
on Zoom. My Zoom classroom was the right setting for the actions I took with my
students because it was the place that I engaged in my pedagogical moves. All of my
critical reflections and self-development actions happened at my house. Conducting my
critical reflections at home made the most sense due to COVID-19. I intended to separate
the space that I taught on Zoom from the space that I engaged in my critical reflections so
that the separation of settings could have helped me differentiate between my researcher
and participant roles. However, it was easiest to write my reflections directly after I
implemented my lessons so most of them were written in the same setting where I taught.
I had access to most of the information needed for my study because I was present
in the setting. My students were the gatekeepers to information; however, I was not
allowed to record them so I took jottings during my observations because I was able to
use them as analytical sticky notes without taking away too much attention from my
students while teaching (Coughlan, 2019; Miles et al., 2014).
Actions
The ideal state that I was after in this research project was to help my learners and
myself develop our sociopolitical consciousness, cultural competence, and move toward
dismantling structural racism and hegemony in our settings. I viewed structural racism as
a by-product of hegemony so I used various texts (novels, articles, documentaries,
podcasts) that discussed race to teach my students about how hegemony perpetuated
structural racism and vice versa. Before the study, I created a curriculum composed of
texts written by Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian American authors to interrogate my
45

students’ racial/cultural identities, epistemologies, ways of knowing, and prior
knowledge. I started the year by reading excerpts from House on Mango Street by Sandra
Cisneros with students as part of our analysis of Latino literature. This text framed our
year because it confronted race, ethnicity, culture, and dominant ideologies. Over the
course of the semester we read several texts from the Asian diaspora together such as
“Hambun Haumbun” by Susan Ito and “Talk to Me Milagros” by Evelina Galang. These
texts exposed students to a wider variety of Asian American experiences, and they also
discussed the intersectionality of being Asian and American, and being an Asian
immigrant living in the United States. These themes were essential to help students
develop their cultural competence and sociopolitical consciousness. The third type of
literature I used in the curriculum was Indigenous literature. For this historically
marginalized group, I used several documentaries and videos of Indigenous people telling
their own story because I thought it necessary to give students the opportunity to connect
with primary sources as I wanted to give them as visceral an experience as possible. We
followed our reading of Indigenous literature by reading Black literature. Students read
“Letter from Birmingham Prison” by Martin Luther King, Jr., and they also watched
several videos and documentaries of Black people talking about their own real-world
experiences. I decided to use a variety of mediums as texts because I wanted to cater to
students’ need to learn from multiple mediums (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Morell &
Duncan-Andrade, 2002), and I wanted to avoid burnout from reading traditional texts
over Zoom. Although I had my curriculum planned before meeting students, my
curriculum evolved to include more digital mediums over short stories and poems
46

because I sensed that students were having a difficult time to stay actively engaged as
evidenced by their cameras being turned off or low verbal participation over Zoom.
During the second cycle of data collection, I asked students to discuss their ideal
world as it pertained to race. I asked students to choose a racial issue that affected them,
their families, community, school, country or world, and present their dream/vision for
how that issue would look like in a utopia. Students were able to use a medium of their
choice such as PowerPoint, poems, a podcast, or a song to represent their ideal world as it
related to race. This activity gave my students the opportunity to share about their
identities, families, and culture. I then asked my students to evaluate how far the current
reality was from this ideal state, and use the literature that we read in class in conjunction
with outside research to discuss the factors that contributed to the gap in the ideal and
current reality of the racial issue they selected. This project, in conjunction with the texts
that students read helped them develop their sociopolitical and cultural competence.
I also leveraged the real-world events of the national elections, Thanksgiving
holiday, the Capital Siege that took place on January 6, 2020, the inauguration of
President Biden that took place in January of 2020, and Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in
January 2020 as part of my curriculum to ask students to critically reflect from a
sociopolitical and cultural competence perspective throughout my study. These were my
broad strokes actions for the 3 months (November–January) that I spent in the field
collecting data. In addition to focusing on my pedagogical moves with students, I was
also critically reflecting on my practice and my implementation of the study weekly
during my time in the field, and I met with my committee chair to debrief at least once
monthly.
47

Data Collection and Instruments/Protocols
My role as the principal investigator included being the primary instrument for
data collection and analysis throughout the study (Maxwell, 2015). I used jottings, the
chat, descriptive/comparative/critical reflections, and classroom/instructional artifacts and
documents to collect data about how my students and I were positioned to achieve the
ideal state outlined in my conceptual framework.
Documents and Artifacts
The documents and artifacts generated in this study helped me analyze how my
learners and I were progressing toward the overall learning goal. The documents and
artifacts that were generated as a regular part of my work were my lesson plans/course
materials, data from the chat, critical reflections, and field notes. The lesson plans
captured my daily learning goals and objectives and an outline of the activities I enacted
daily. The course materials were my syllabus, unit plan and text set. The chat captured
interactions between students and each other and students and me and verbatim quotes of
their/our interactions. The critical reflections captured my visceral reactions and
reflections on my lesson implementations, my interactions with students, and my
positionality and elements of my identity that were most present in my teaching on the
day I reflected. My field notes captured verbatim quotes of what students and I said
during our interactions and observational comments I made during the implementation of
my lessons. The first documents that I generated were descriptive/comparative/critical
reflections.

48

Critical Reflection
Critical reflections were an integral part of my work as an action researcher. They
provided data, and were also analytical tools for me to understand how I was developing
my sociopolitical consciousness and contributing to/pushing against the hegemonic
systems in my classroom. These critical reflections also helped me understand my
assumptions, biases, shortcomings, and teaching strengths. I conducted weekly
descriptive/comparative/critical reflections for 3 weeks before the start of the study to
gauge where my students, and I were in the process of developing our sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence to dismantle structural racism and hegemony. I
wrote critical reflections at the beginning and the ending of each cycle, and I also
reflected on my instruction six times over the 9 weeks I spent in the field. While I had a
planned schedule for reflecting, I also reflected on moments outside of my planned
schedule when I needed to think through something that occurred in a lesson. Rodgers
(2002) says that a teacher needs to look beyond what was planned and observe what is
actually happening in the classroom as a form of being present. I used the findings from
those reflections to help me plan how I would implement the pedagogical actions I
previously outlined. During the 3 months data collection period, I intended to write
weekly descriptive/comparative/critical reflections to help me analyze and internalize the
ways in which I was demonstrating progress in developing my sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence and engaging in my pedagogical moves to
support students’ learning. During the first cycle, I conducted five critical reflections. In
the second cycle, I conducted four reflections, and during the third cycle, I conducted
49

three critical reflections for a total of 12 throughout the study. In addition to critical
reflections, I generated jottings and field notes during my observations.
Observations
I conducted a series of classroom observations throughout this project. I generated
jottings from my classroom observations. I observed myself in the classroom through
using jottings. In my jottings, I captured the order of my instructions and lesson activities,
direct quotations from students and me, the time of each activity/comment, the names of
students that participated, and any observational comments. The jottings helped me write
rich field notes because they provided direct quotations (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). At
the end of each observation, I converted my jottings to descriptive field notes by adding
context of the setting, the instructions, and the discourse. I also wrote any major
observations/takeaways that I had from my observations. In his book, Brookfield (2017)
discusses that teachers cannot know whether they are helping students make progress in
their learning unless they give students an opportunity to tell them. Collecting student
discourse (verbally and in the chat) was one way of me inviting my students into the
conversation to reflect on their learning. These jottings and field notes helped to paint a
fuller picture of my interaction with my students and the quality of my implementation of
my pedagogical moves (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). For example, I was able to see how
students were taking up sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, if students
demonstrated an understanding of the daily task and accomplished the lesson objectives,
and I was also able to keep track of which pedagogical moves from my conceptual
framework I was implementing.
50

Each observation lasted 50 minutes to an hour (a full class session) and took place
18 times throughout the study. I conducted 12 observations in my 10
th
grade class and six
observations in my 12
th
grade class. I had 18 total hours of jottings and descriptive field
notes. During my first two cycles, I observed my classes once weekly. However, during
my third cycle, I observed my 10
th
grade students each time I taught the class on a
rotating block schedule.
Data Analysis
I engaged in two discrete analytic phases, one while I was in the field and one
when I left the field. First, I will discuss my analytical process while in the field. The data
analysis phase helped me draw conclusions and create theories of my findings (Bogdan &
Biklen, 2007; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The iterative, multiple cycle process of action
research allows for the researcher to analyze the data at the end of each cycle and adjust
and make changes as they proceed while they are still in the field (Coghlan, 2019; Herr &
Anderson, 2015; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). I was in the field for 3 months, and I had
three research cycles that lasted about 4 weeks within this 3-month research timeframe. I
used each 4-week cycle to collect data for 3 weeks and analyzed the data for 1 week to
write an analytical memo before returning to the field. I also analyzed how I grew in
between cycles. My second cycle ended at winter break so there were 3 weeks between
the second and third cycles.
Critical reflections were one of my main forms of data analysis while in the field.
I used critical reflection as a tool to analyze my learners’ identities, epistemologies, ways
of knowing, prior knowledge and the literature on pedagogy. I relied on my jottings, field
notes and conversations with my committee chair to write my critical reflections. My
51

committee chair served as a scaffold for my data analysis. Critical reflection is most
effective when it involves multiple perspectives (Brookfield, 2017). These conversations
helped me to draw on my race and positionality and how they impacted my interactions
with my students. Some of the questions we discussed were: How have I benefited from
hegemony? How did my own experiences and identity influence my expectations of my
students? How was I contributing structurally to the hegemonic systems I am trying to
fight against at my school? Where did I learn to internalize structural racism and
hegemony, and how did those practices influence the way I worked to dismantle it in my
classroom? How can I better use liberatory teacher leadership to the fight against racism
and hegemony? How did I use my experiences as a teacher to develop sociopolitical
consciousness, cultural competence, and push back against and or express counter
hegemonic narratives? How did I consider my students’ culture, and use my instructional
strategies to help them connect the content to their culture? How did my pedagogical
moves empower students to advocate for themselves? In what ways did I give students
the tools to unearth structural racism and hegemony in their lives and communities? I
used all the knowledge gained from these critical reflections and conversations to help
me analyze my data and plan and implement actions that pushed my current students
toward the ideal state. Critically reflecting under the guidance of my adviser helped me to
triangulate the data that I collected while in the field, and it also helped to push my
thinking to consider other possibilities and perspectives. These critical reflections also
helped me gauge students’ and my own progress toward the ideal state and answer the
research question.
52

I generated a priori codes from my conceptual framework to analyze instructional
documents, jottings, and field notes, and I wrote my findings in an analytical memo
(Patton, 2007) during the end of each cycle. Some examples of a priori codes that I
looked for were critical discourse and safe and brave space. Given that critical discourse
and safe and brave space were two of my pedagogical moves, I was over zealous in
finding instances of these codes in my first in-field data analysis. I wrote the analytical
memo so that I could begin understanding how the research question was being
answered, and to generate data for interventions so that I could engage in more focused
practices that supported my students’ and my progress toward the overarching learning
goal (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Coghlan, 2019; Herr & Anderson, 2015; Miles et al.,
2014). To write these memos, I asked myself questions about the choices I set out to
make in my instruction in relation to my conceptual framework and research question
versus the choices that I actually made and looked for evidence to answer my questions.
For example: What is driving my instructional practices? How does it relate to my
conceptual framework/what I was setting out to accomplish? This data provided me with
initial understandings so that I could adjust my instruction throughout the cycles and
minimize any instructional harm being done to my learners (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016). Instructional harm was something that I was constantly focused on because I was
engaging in this project to bring about positive change to my students, me, and my
organization (Herr & Anderson, 2015).
Outside of the field, I conducted three iterative sets of coding to analyze my data.
I started with an open coding cycle where I analyzed and assessed all of the data that I
collected within the field. Merriam and Tisdell (2016) describe this style of data analysis
53

as having a conversation with the data. I conducted this cycle of coding by writing
comments at the side of my observations. This process involved summarizing my
observations about the different categories of a priori codes that were present, selecting
the relevant information from my field notes to code, and further interpreting any codes
that were still unclear (Harding, 2015). After this initial phase of coding, I tried to group
the once general a priori codes into more specific categories and nominalize those
categories in a way that attached meaning and interpretation to the data in a codebook in
Excel (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). I tried to categorize each code under a different
category of my conceptual framework, and I assigned each code a different color in Excel
so that I had a visual representation of my codebook. For example, I categorized codes
such as presence and whole class discussion under the self and pedagogical moves
sections of my conceptual framework respectively because these were elements that
correlated with that specific element of my conceptual framework. I experienced coding
blockage during this round of data analysis because it was difficult for me to truly see my
data, and I was demonstrating research bias (Corbin & Strauss, 2014) because I was
forcing things to fit into my conceptual understanding. To help me break out of this style
of coding, I abandoned my codebook, switched back to conversing with my data in the
form of comments in the margins and applied several analytical tools to help me engage
in deeper analysis.
I applied several analytical tools such as questioning the data, and theoretical
comparisons to help me see elements that I might have missed during my first attempt at
coding. Corbin and Strauss (2014) recommend using these strategies to overcome coding
blockages, and they were essential in my data analysis as I experienced many moments of
54

getting stuck in my data. Theoretical comparisons were especially important because they
provided me with a lens and language of analysis that I was then able to analyze my
codes against. I engaged in this process by using several lenses from the literature to
analyze my data. I applied concepts of the ethics of care (authentic and aesthetic),
classroom climate, and codes from Camangian’s own conceptual framework (agitate,
arouse, and inspire) that led me to discover that I was engaging in liberatory teacher
leadership in my study. Through analyzing the literature and applying its concepts to my
data, I was able to generate empirical codes in comparison to the literature I read such as
the ones referenced above. One example of another empirical code that emerged in this
coding cycle was my tracking of interactions between my students and me to see whether
they were representative of authentic care or aesthetic care. Analyzing the literature
against the data allowed me to see the bigger picture of my codes and increased my
understanding of the concepts that were emerging in my data (Corbin & Strauss, 2014).
This new round of data analysis took me beyond my initial level of understanding and a
priori codes and generated emergent codes that were generated from the literature, my
conceptual framework, and my in the field analysis (Herr & Anderson, 2015). It was also
during this cycle of coding that I began generating and finalizing my definitions of
concepts instead of simply regurgitating the literature.
After this phase of analysis, I engaged in pattern coding. Pattern codes are
explanatory/inferential codes that identify an emergent theme or explanation from the
data (Miles et al., 2014). This third round of coding allowed me to condense large
amounts of data into smaller analytical units that I was able to use to generate meaning.
Table 1 displays a sample of these pattern codes. For example, in studying the pattern
55

codes in Table 1, I was able to see that I had three different types of discourse in my
study (verbal, chat and written assignments), and I had high academic expectations in the
chat and written assignment discourse only.
During this round of data analysis, I also closely read the language in my
observations, and I interpreted the meaning behind the words. Corbin and Strauss (2014)
call this process looking at language. This analytical tool was essential in helping me to
generate my own understanding of my data instead of simply regurgitating other’s ideas
and theory. It was during this phase of coding that I was able to generate the codes that
ultimately led me to my findings, and I created a new codebook. At the end of this coding
process, I had specific data that told me how the actions that I implemented helped my
learners and me develop our sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence and
made progress toward dismantling structural racism and hegemony.

56

Table 1
Codebook excerpt
Care Chat Verbal Assignment/
Written
Strengths
(Aesthetic Care)
High behavior
expectations
Agitate -
Liberatory Teacher
Leadership -
assistant questions,
cognitive
structuring
Agitating students
critically &
Cognitive
Structuring and
Modeling
agitate students
critically

(High academic
expectations)
High academic
Expectations
High academic
Expectations
Agitating Students
Critically –
Encouraging
Discourse (High
behavior
expectations)
Agitate - liberatory
teacher leadership
Maximizing
instructional time
High behavior
expectations

Agitate -
developing
students'
worldview/ asking
them to consider
multiple POV
(cognitive
structuring)
Agitate -
considering
something from
multiple
perspectives
(cognitive
structuring)
Arouse students
critically –
(modeling,
questions,
cognitive
structuring)
Agitate - Engage in
readings that
demystifies
oppression

Agitate - engaging
in readying that
demystifies
oppression
Arouse - paying
attention to
multiple POV
(Cognitive
structuring)

Agitate -
liberatory teacher
leadership -
creating space/the
opportunity for
students to actually
develop their SPC.
Spiraled instruction
Weaknesses
(Authentic Care)
High behavior
expectations

Removing myself
from the
conversation, and
not planning
scaffolds ahead of
ZPD Weaknesses
Affected the
development of
their SPC
(cognitive
Agitate students
emotionally
● (Personal
connection)

57

time (anticipating
student learning
needs)

dissonance, student
discourse with each
other, instrumental
learners, not
expanding student
thought)
High academic
Expectations

Lack of assistive
means – feedback,
instructing,
questioning
Lack of:
assistance
questions
Modeling
Feedback
my goals and
expectations were
too vague
Arouse - student
self-initiated critical
curiosity / action
toward social
change

Maximizing
instructional time

Arouse - action
toward social
change

Weaknesses
patterns:

Engaging in the
same practices as
aesthetic care

Lack of ZPD scaffolds
Not engaging
students
emotionally, and
nor scaffolding
them enough to get
to a place where
they can be arouse
critically
Strengths Patterns
● Although I did not highlight “high academic expectations” as a code for
verbal, I think that it is there/present embedded in the different SPC moves
and strengths I exhibited in this discourse
● The difference between agitate and arouse
● Agitate – I am doing the scaffolding to get students to think in a certain way
– I do
● Arouse – I see the development of students independent thought – they do
● We do us missing
● There is a shift from agitating in the assignment and verbal discourses to
arousing in the chat memo. The chat memo (presentations was the place for
students to demonstrate their own learning) so although I did not interfere
to a consequence, my lack of presence also shows the students’ growth. I
think the move from agitate to arouse also demonstrates that by the time the
data was collected for the chat memo – scaffolding had occurred to help
students develop and present more independent thoughts.
● Written/assignment discourse – all SPC (is this true or did I just not have
the ZPD language yet?
● Cognitive structuring is my/the most used scaffold (operating with the SPC
mindset
● I had a specific goal of SPC that I was overly focused on
58

● Agitate – liberatory teacher leadership are in all 3 types of discourse
● If there’s anything that transcends all 4 its high behavior/academic
expectations. I think even where they are not explicit, they are present
● When I scaffold, I am able to push students toward more development of
their SPC

Coding was a form of both evaluating my conceptual framework in the sense that
it told me whether what I expected to see happened, and it was also a process that showed
me how and in what other ways my research question was answered that I did not
anticipate. I used narrative description, jottings, and memos to add analysis to the codes,
and help me track the development of the findings overtime (Miles et al., 2014).
Narrative descriptions are story-like analysis that describes how the participants changed
throughout the study (Miles et al., 2014). I used jottings to keep track of my emergent
reflections and commentary on issues that arose during the fieldwork and data analysis.
Lastly, I used memos to document my reflections and analytical data. Memos are
analytical narratives that attempt to synthesize the data into higher-level analytical
meanings (Miles et al., 2014). I used memos to tie the different clusters of data together
into emergent concepts and theories. I engaged in this deeper analysis outside of the field
because it was more time consuming, and at that time, I had all the data and not just
portions to begin to make sense of my findings. After the completion of the data analysis
process and the construction of a theory, my findings and arguments were then presented
in this narrative.
Limitations and Delimitations
A major benefit of a self-study action research is that the researcher is familiar
with the context of the project. Bogdan and Biklen (2007) write that a way to get rich
59

data is to build rapport and trust with participants. I did not have this added benefit of
familiarity because I was new to my organization during the 2020-2021school year.
COVID-19 was also a limitation because it altered the way that I taught and interacted
with my students. Interacting with my students in an online setting versus in person made
it more difficult to observe their response to my pedagogical moves because their
cameras were off. COVID-19 also decreased the amount of time that I met with students
synchronously so I had less time to implement my pedagogical moves during the data
collection period. Another limitation was the principal/district not granting teachers
permission to record their online lessons so I was not able to use this data for
observational purposes. A final limitation that I came across during the study was that I
was a novice researcher, and my novice status limited what I could accomplish in the
study.
One delimitation is that I chose to study myself teaching two different grade
levels. Perhaps focusing on one grade level from the very beginning might have allowed
for more specific data from the beginning of the study. A second delimitation is that I
decided to bound my study by focusing on historically marginalized students in the
United States, and I was born and raised outside of the United States and came to the
study with a different positionality, political framework and agency in relation to my
students. Although I had some familiarity with Black and Latino culture and oppressed
experiences, I did not experience systematic racism and hegemony the same way as most
of my students did given my immigrant identity. As such, my identity did not always
position me well to know what my students needed from me as historically marginalized
peoples in the United States. In addition, I tackled Indigenous and Asian identities and
60

cultures that I was less/not familiar with. My lack of knowledge and cultural capital
affected the depth I was able to go in helping my students apply a counter hegemonic lens
to the sociopolitical and culturally competent issues we discussed in my curriculum. I
strove to find out all relevant information about my students’ culture as I taught;
however, I struggled to truly demonstrate cultural competence for cultures that I was less
familiar with.
A final delimitation of the study was the inherently amateur choices that I made
because I was new to engaging in such high caliber research methods. The inconsistent
documentation and the quality of my documents/artifacts, critical reflections, and
observations are some examples of novice choices I made in the study. For example, I did
not document the process of creating a curriculum to engage in liberatory teacher
leadership, and I only accounted for this process in my retrospective reflections and
narratives. Additionally, in cycle one, I combined my critical reflections with my
reflective notes from my observations so I wrote many critical reflections that lacked
expansion. Finally, in cycle two week 3, I did not observe my 12
th
grade class because I
was struggling to wear the teacher and observer hats. These examples point to the
delimitations of my data collection process.
Credibility and Trustworthiness
Given that my action research project was a self-study, I had to implement several
credible and trustworthy actions to discipline my subjectivity throughout my research.
Coghlan (2019) emphasizes that it is important that an action researcher implements steps
that will help them differentiate when they are interacting in their organization as a
researcher versus as a member of the organization because they will inevitably encounter
61

role conflict. To minimize threats to validity during my data collection phase, I was
transparent about how my identity and experiences informed the way that I approached
my study. I talked to students about my background, beliefs, cultural experiences, and
cultural capital. I also checked for validity through using triangulation. I triangulated the
data from my rich descriptive jottings and field notes with documents and artifacts to
ensure that I could adequately prove the conclusions and theories that emerged from the
research. Maxwell (2015) cautions that triangulation is more than looking for the same
data within different sources because one can triangulate their biases. As the subject of
my study, it was easy for me to perform specific strategies that I think I should be
performing on the days that I observed myself. Thus, I also used three out of four critical
reflection lenses that Brookfield highlights in his work—autobiographical, colleagues’
experiences, and theoretical literature—to triangulate.
I triangulated data through the colleagues’ experiences by asking my adviser to
give me feedback on how my teaching practices were helping students connect to their
culture, and giving them the tools to unearth structural racism and hegemony in their
lives and communities. I also utilized peer checking to increase the credibility of my
findings. In order for peer feedback to be a validity strategy, a colleague needs the
opportunity to look at the raw data, and findings (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). I provided
my adviser with the data and the findings and asked her to check the reality of my
findings as a way for me (the member) to engage in member checking. Finally, I used
theory to help me analyze how my personal reflections supported or went against the
literature. Brookfield (2017) writes that theory explodes settled worldviews.
62

I also used catalytic validity to evaluate the rigor of my study. Herr and Anderson
(2015) describe catalytic validity as “the degree to which the research process reorients,
focuses, and energizes participants toward knowing reality in order to transform it” (p.
69). Catalytic validity required that I monitored the change in both the participants’, and
my understanding of the study’s focus to measure whether there was a deepening of
understanding of the study focus. I also checked my biases through critical reflection and
analytical memoirs. Through analyzing the data using various validity measures the
theories discovered expanded my worldview on my research and findings.
Ethics
Given that I studied my own practice in relation to others in my work setting, I
needed to ensure that my research did not cause anyone harm. The first step that I took to
ensure that my research was being conducted in an ethical manner was to submit to
USC’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB’s role is to avoid or prevent abusive
behavior and violations against the university (Coghlan, 2019). I engaged in my setting as
a researcher and as a teacher so there was an intersection between the ethics of learning
and the ethics of researching that I needed to be cognizant of and abide by throughout this
work. Herr and Anderson (2015) and Coghlan (2019) states that an action researcher
needs to be transparent about their role duality to participants so I disclosed as much
information as I could about my conflicting roles to my students and my colleagues, even
though they were not a part of my study.
Rubin (2012) cautions that when studying any marginalized group or within a
marginalized context, the findings in the study should also benefit those who shared their
experiences with you to minimize ethical issues. I will be transparent with my findings
63

when asked by students or colleagues for details on my study so that the research can
have the maximum benefit for my students and organization. Given the nature of action
research, and critical reflections, I also needed to take steps to address the ethics of power
and authorship in my research. To do so, I asked my adviser to analyze my critical
reflections to monitor the way power and authorship had transpired. To address
confidentiality, I removed all identifiable information from my documents and used
pseudonyms to protect the privacy of my students and colleagues. Finally, I stored the
data in a cloud drive that was behind a firewall so it would be difficult for another person
to access the information.
Findings
In this section, I discuss my findings in relation to my research question: How do
I create a space to support the development and deepening of a counter hegemonic lens in
students to develop and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence to explore structural racism and hegemony that influences theirs and others
individual experiences? This section will answer my research question in four parts: my
development of a culturally relevant curriculum at the beginning of the study, my
enactment of the curriculum through my activities and assignments, the areas my students
grew and the areas I grew. In the first part, I discuss the actions I took to create a
curriculum that operationalized liberatory teacher leadership by developing students’
ability to use a counter hegemonic lens to develop and deepen their sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence. In the second part, I discuss my enactment of the
curriculum. In the third part, I discuss the areas in which students grew in their use of a
counter hegemonic lens to develop and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and
64

cultural competence. In the fourth part, I discuss the areas in which I grew as a liberatory
teacher leader as demonstrated through my use of assistant questions to develop and
deepen students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence.
Research Question 1, Part 1: Establishing a Culturally Relevant Curriculum to
Enact Liberatory Teacher Leadership
At the outset of the study, I did not have a well-established culturally relevant
curriculum that focused on the development of students’ sociopolitical consciousness and
cultural competence. I realized that in order to help students develop and deepen these
skills, I needed to create a curriculum that supported their development. To address part 1
of research question 1, the remainder of this section discusses the two themes related to
this finding: an analysis of the curriculum components, and my teaching of Indigenous
literature and its implications.
Curriculum and Curriculum Components
I came through a culturally relevant pedagogy perspective when writing my
curriculum. I engaged in liberatory teacher leadership, a culturally relevant teaching
practice, in the constructing and implementing of a curriculum for the 2020-2021 school
year that was intended to develop and deepen students’ sociopolitical consciousness and
cultural competence. Schools are bound by hegemonic forces that teach students to be
compliant to systems that are against their self-interest (Camangian, 2015; Ladson-
Billings, 2014). Consistent with my conceptual framework, hegemony is the preservation
of the status quo and a pretense that oppressive systems are natural, pre-ordained, and
working for the common good of all (Brookfield, 2010). It functions by making the
dominant perspective seem as the norm as a way to avoid questioning and interrogation
65

of oppressive systems (Brookfield, 2010). Liberatory teacher leaders push back against
these forms of hegemony, systemic and systematic oppression in education (Camangian,
2015). Consistent with my conceptual framework, liberatory teacher leadership is a
culturally relevant pedagogy teaching practice that entails being honest about the
historical and material contradictions that have created the social conditions impacting
oppressed communities throughout the world and fostering opportunities for students to
interpret and discuss relevant actions that might lead to transformative change
(Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim,
2014). Teachers enact liberatory teacher leadership, and raise students’ sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence through using a counter hegemonic lens.
Consistent with my conceptual framework, a counter hegemonic lens equips students to
view the world from a perspective where historically marginalized perspectives and
experiences are valued (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014;
Paris & Alim, 2014). Sociopolitical consciousness is the awareness of the hegemonic
systems and practices that are at work in the local, national, and global settings that
support those who have privilege and encourages marginalization (Camangian, 2015;
Ladson-Billings, 2014; Santamaría, 2009), and cultural competence is the understanding
and valuing of one’s own cultural experiences and the cultural experiences of other racial
groups (Ladson-Billings, 1992; Paris & Alim, 2014).
My curriculum included three components: the course overview, an essential
question, and the texts. I used my prior academic knowledge of the texts I read, the
literature from my Ed.D. coursework and my professional experience of knowing whose
voices and stories were omitted in the English classroom to construct a curriculum that
66

would teach students how to apply a counter hegemonic lens to sociopolitical issues and
cultural experiences, the core components of liberatory teacher leadership. I designed
each component of the curriculum with the intent to disrupt normative thinking and
reveal to students the existence and the inner workings of the hegemonic systems, the
way that they exist in schools, binds historically marginalized people, and favors the
White race in the United States in mind (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-
Billings, 1992). Although the curriculum was intended to demonstrate liberatory teacher
leadership by equally focusing on sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, I
inadvertently ended up focusing on the development and deepening of students’
sociopolitical consciousness more than their cultural competence. I will discuss the
implications of this choice.
Sociopolitical consciousness was a common thread that ran through my entire
curriculum; however, cultural competence was only a main focus in the text selection
segment. Not pulling cultural competence as a common thread in all aspects of the
curriculum was a detriment to truly creating a liberatory learning environment that
prepared students to interpret and discuss relevant issues that might lead to transformative
change for themselves and communities because the curriculum missed some
opportunities to connect with students on a personal level. Sociopolitical consciousness
or cultural competence cannot stand on their own to liberate students from hegemony
(Ladson-Billings, 2014). Consistent with my conceptual framework, students need to
apply a counter hegemonic lens to both to realize the inner workings of the hegemonic
systems in their lives and be moved to disrupt those systems (Camangian, 2015). In this
section I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of my enactment of liberatory teacher
67

leadership in relation to sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence in the three
sections of my curriculum.
Course Overview. I used a counter hegemonic lens to enact liberatory teacher
leadership in my course overview. The course overview framed the curriculum and
influenced the essential question: How does the past shape our present and future?
which served as a narrative thread that was drawn through the entire curriculum and
implementation, and the texts I used in the course. It expounded on my learning
intentions for the course, and it signaled the liberatory teacher leader approach of using a
counter hegemonic lens to build students’ sociopolitical consciousnesses and
sociopolitical consciousness I intended to take in the course. It stated,
Students in this Honors English 10 class will spend the year exploring themes of
identity, freedom, power, and justice. Each semester students will read historical
and literary texts, learn to analyze concepts and details, engage in seminars and
discussions, and build essays that challenge, support, or qualify ideas found in
American and Global ideologies. This course will focus on controversial topics
such as race, class, gender, sexuality, violence, religion, and American
history. I understand that these issues can be emotional and often intertwined
with issues of identity, culture, and personal experience. As such, I invite and
welcome students and families who experience discomfort with the material to
reach out to me sooner rather than later. Students will also be required to read
three independent books throughout the school year. A list will be provided
but you can also select your own texts. (emphasis in original)
68

This course overview was written from a counter hegemonic perspective. From the
beginning of the course, I presented students and parents with the alternative lens that I
was going to be using in the class. The phrases, “students in this Honors English 10 class
will spend the year exploring themes of identity, freedom, power, and justice” and “each
semester students will read historical and literary texts, learn to analyze concepts and
details, engage in seminars and discussions, and build essays that challenge, support, or
qualify ideas found in American and Global ideologies” showed that I anticipated the
need to reframe students’ understanding of what identity, freedom, power, and justice
meant for historically marginalized peoples in the United States. I informed them that I
would set out to take on a disruptive act in the classroom by challenging previous
dominant ideas about sociopolitical issues, identity, and cultural issues. Consistent with
Brookfield, the themes of identity freedom, power and justice that were highlighted in the
course overview pointed to major elements of hegemony. To challenge hegemony, one
must question who has freedom, the power to rule and oppress and what justice systems
are in place for equity (Brookfield, 2010). I intended to challenge these ideas through
introducing students to a counter hegemonic lens that would lead to the development of
their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. Themes of sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence were intertwined in my course overview.
A counter hegemonic lens helps students to unearth alternative perspectives and
alternative truths about a phenomenon (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015). I wanted to
design a course that addressed the inequities in multiple social systems, starting first with
race. I outlined my focus in the following sentence, “this course will focus on
controversial topics such as race, class, gender, sexuality, violence, religion, and
69

American history.” The positioning of the word “race” first in the sentence signaled that
race was at the forefront of my brain, and it was the hegemonic system that was of utmost
importance for me to disrupt in my classroom. The word “controversial” demonstrated
my acknowledgement that my intention to challenge the ideas of identity, power, freedom
and justice and its intersection with race and other social systems would be disruptive
because it was counterhegemonic. Furthermore, I knew that my decision to tackle
hegemony in this way in the classroom was not the norm, and as a result, “I invited and
welcomed students and families who experienced discomfort with the material to reach
out to me sooner rather than later.” My anticipation of potential pushback demonstrated
my own sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence because I knew that some
of my students’ families would be against a sociopolitically conscious, culturally relevant
and liberatory curriculum that centered historically marginalized voices. The dominant
perspective has become so normalized and functional that pushing against it can be seen
as ignorant and uncultured and cause backlash.
In his work, Brookfield highlighted cultural suicide as a consequence of engaging
in critical reflection that challenged hegemony in the workplace. Cultural suicide is the
fear of ostracization or being judged for being a know it all for challenging hegemony
(Brookfield, 2010). My acknowledgement of my students and their families’ potential
discomfort in my course overview, and my decision to proceed with my intended content
anyways showed that I was operating as a liberatory teacher leader who was willing to
risk cultural suicide in order to teach content that would challenge hegemonic systems
and lead to social transformation. Pursuing liberatory teacher leadership required me to
embrace discomfort because a counter hegemonic lens reveals the uncomfortable truth
70

about the true extent of racial oppression in the United States and embracing this
discomfort is the only way to be disruptive in a hegemonic context (Brookfield, 2010;
Camangian, 2015). My course overview was intertwined with ideas of both sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence, but it leaned more toward sociopolitical
consciousness. It was intended to be a model for how the additional parts of the
curriculum would develop ideologically; however, the essential question, which was
written in response to the course overview, further highlighted the stark difference in how
much I was more sociopolitically inclined versus culturally competent in writing the
curriculum.
Essential Question. The essential question was intended to enact liberatory
teacher leadership by serving as a marker of progress for the development and deepening
of students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence as I moved through the
course content; however, I only used it to focus on sociopolitical consciousness. Hence,
when I assessed students’ growth in answering the essential question and my growth in
assisting their learning to answer the essential question in later themes, the growth was
predominantly in the area of sociopolitical consciousness. As I previously mentioned, the
essential question served as a narrative thread that was drawn through the entire
curriculum and implementation. It set up a spiraled curriculum in the sense that it drew
directly from the course overview and it also influenced the literature I read with
students, which consequentially influenced the learning activities and assignments I
implemented in the course. It was introduced at the beginning of the course, where it
began the inquiry into the ideas I intended to study, and it was revisited throughout the
curriculum as the course content developed. It presented the sociopolitical ideas and
71

counter hegemonic lens that I wanted students to develop, deepen and apply. The
essential question stated, How does the past shape our present and future?
The first step I took in the course was to use a counter hegemonic lens to build
students’ sociopolitical consciousness by providing them with the historical context of
how hegemony created and sustaining the racial historical marginalization of non-Whites
in the United States. This step is implied in the word “past” in the essential question. The
word “past” referred to White Americans’ long history of treating historically
marginalized people inhumanely that I emphasized in the course through our readings
and discussions. It also referred back to the theme of “American History” that I
introduced and said I would challenge in the course overview. This symbiotic
relationship is shown in the word “shape,” which demonstrated that the past informs the
present and future. By discussing how hegemony in the United States originated, I
wanted students to acquire and apply a counter hegemonic lens in order to understand
that hegemony was a historicity and an entrenched inequity. I wanted students to
understand that the present day and future inequities did not occur by happenchance, but
instead, it is a system that was designed to function in a discriminatory way. Consistent
with Brookfield, Ladson-Billings, Paris and Alim, and Rodgers, a counter hegemonic
lens helps students uncover these relationships because it is a tool that equips students to
acquire the sociopolitical consciousness needed to take intelligent action toward
interrogating and dismantling oppressive dominant White ideologies. My urgency to help
students understand the innerworkings of hegemony is consistent with Camangian,
Ladson-Billings, and Santamaría’s definition of sociopolitical consciousness. A liberatory
teacher leader uses a counter hegemonic lens to build students’ awareness of the
72

hegemonic systems and practices that are at work in their local and national settings so
that they can understand their positionality to the issues and take intelligent action
(Brookfield, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014; Rodgers, 2002). By
emphasizing the entrenched inequities in the United States’ history, the question was
intended to emphasize the depth of oppression that historically marginalized peoples have
faced in the United States.
The purpose of the second and third sections of the question, the focus on the
“present,” and “future” was to raise students’ awareness of present-day struggles so that
they could develop and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness through understanding
the longevity of hegemony and see its effects on their own lives. Consistent with
Brookfield, Ladson-Billings, and Paris and Alim, an essential act in building students’
sociopolitical consciousness is giving them the opportunity to understand how systems
function not only outside of them but how they are complicit in it. Hence, asking students
to consider the historical point of view of hegemonic systems and then explore those
systems in the present was intended to help them understand their positionality and the
role they play in upholding harmful hegemonic systems. My responsibility in building
students’ sociopolitical consciousness so that they could work to dismantle hegemony
was also embedded in the word “future.” I needed to show students the ways that
hegemony and historical marginalization functioned in the past and continued to manifest
in the present in order for them to understand that it was a cycle that was likely to repeat
in the future unless we came together as a society and did something differently
(Camangian, 2015; Freire, 1992). I also focused on the “future” in order to inspire and
equip students to think about how they could apply their counter hegemonic and
73

sociopolitical knowledge to the future to help free marginalized people, who in most
instances included them, their families and their closest friends. The essential question in
itself was broad and could have been used to also answer how the past influenced the
present and future culture of historically marginalized peoples; however, I predominantly
interpreted it from a sociopolitical lens and connected it to the historical sociopolitical
perspectives that were present in my course overview. I accounted for cultural
competence in the selection of my texts that I used to answer the essential question,
instead of using the essential question to address cultural competence directly. In the next
section, I will provide an overview of how the essential question and course overview
influenced the texts I inserted into the curriculum.
Text Selection. I was engaging in the actions of a liberatory teacher leader as I
came through the sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence door when
selecting the literature. Text selection was the main area of my curriculum that I focused
on cultural competence explicitly, and even focused on it more than sociopolitical
consciousness. My intention to use literature written by Black, Indigenous, Asian, and
Latino authors in the course embodied my definition of cultural competence. My purpose
was to give my Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino students the opportunity to grow in
their understanding of themselves, their culture and history, and the culture and history of
historically marginalized races by reading and analyzing literature written by authors of
their respective race and historically marginalized authors outside of their race. In
addition, I also wanted students to have the opportunity to deepen their cultural
competence through comparing the cultural history and practices of different racial
groups with their own cultural experiences. A counter hegemonic lens was used to help
74

students appreciate and value historical marginalized peoples’ culture in spite of their
hegemonic influence, and also build their awareness of how hegemony and structural
racism affects all historically marginalized groups in the United States.
Through reading literature written by multiple historically marginalized groups, I
also intended for students to deepen their sociopolitical consciousness by dissecting the
ways in which hegemonic systems have perpetuated racism for historically marginalized
groups in the United States. The goal was to provide the opportunity for students to have
a richer understanding of racism, and to help students become liberated from hegemonic
ideas by grappling with systemic and systematic racism from the perspective of the
oppressed and not the oppressor. I intentionally silenced White literary voices in the
classroom to open up a rare space whereby the stories, histories and lived experiences of
historically marginalized peoples were prioritized so that I could engage in a liberatory,
counter hegemonic, culturally relevant and necessary act. Although I chose literature
from Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino authors for the larger curriculum, here in my
findings, I focus on my experience of planning the Indigenous literature section of my
curriculum. I believed it was essential for students to develop their sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence about Indigenous peoples as they were the first
racial group to experience racial discrimination in the United States (National Geographic
Society, n.d.). I believed that studying Indigenous literature would have helped students
acquire a deeper understanding of how the United States’ past influenced its future and
present treatment of other historically marginalized peoples. The discourse that occurred
in studying Indigenous literature with students was also an example of how students
engaged with the literature throughout the study, and where they were in their overall
75

ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to historically marginalized peoples’ culture
and history.
Indigenous Literature. I chose to include Indigenous literature in my curriculum
because I believed students lacked cultural competence and limited sociopolitical
consciousness in this area of study. I had this assumption due to my limited experience
with studying Indigenous literature history and culture in my own schooling. Given these
experiences, I knew that reading literature written by Indigenous authors would give
students an opportunity to come into contact with the cultural experiences and values of
members from Indigenous communities that is often omitted from school curriculums.
This body of literature set the precedent for how I addressed the United States’
hegemonic and racist past that I outlined in my course overview and essential question.
I selected several excerpts from the text Bad Indian to read with students because
the author, Deborah A. Miranda, challenged the false narratives of Indigenous history
that are widely accepted as truth. For example, in the excerpt “A Few Corrections to my
Daughter’s Coloring Book,” the author rewrites an article written from a White Anglo-
Saxon perspective to show all of the Indigenous references and true history that were
omitted. I paired these excerpts with several videos such as “6 Misconceptions of Native
American People” by Teen Vogue and documentaries such as “The Trail of Tears” and
“Life on the Rez” to purposefully trigger unlearning amongst my students. Indigenous
peoples told their own stories and challenged the stories that were usually told about them
in each of these videos and excerpts. These stories and videos positioned me to make
progress toward building students’ cultural competence because they presented counter
hegemonic narratives about Indigenous history, culture and identities for students to
76

learn, perhaps for the first time, and compare to their own cultural experiences. They also
positioned me to develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness because they
demonstrated that the history that was only told from the oppressor’s perspective was full
of lies and further perpetuated the systemic and systematic oppression and
marginalization of Indigenous peoples. The focus on both sociopolitical consciousness
and cultural competence that was evident in my selection of texts did not follow through
to the activities and assignments. I depended on the literature to do the work of building
students’ sociopolitical consciousness, and as previously demonstrated in other parts of
the curriculum, I also predominantly focused on sociopolitical consciousness in my
teaching of Indigenous literature.
Research Question 1, Part 1I: Enactment of Curriculum
I operated as a liberatory teacher leader in my enactment of the curriculum, and
that played itself out in the assignments and activities I used in my classroom. These
assignments and activities were intended to help students use a counter hegemonic lens to
build students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. However, they
predominantly targeted building students’ sociopolitical consciousness. I had students do
a “Know Wonder Learned” chart about Indigenous peoples’ history and culture in
America and California at the beginning of our Indigenous unit. Through their
exemplification, I came to understand students’ limited knowledge and misconceptions
about Indigenous history. Some students shared that they did not know a lot about
Indigenous culture or way of life, and most had never read Indigenous literature, and if
they had it was The Absolute True Story of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, which
revealed their lack of cultural competence. When students expressed not being familiar
77

with Indigenous literature or history, I casually mentioned, “You know the way we
celebrate Thanksgiving is not the actual history right?” For the most part, their response
was no. Although I predicted and expected many students to lack cultural competence
about our Indigenous peoples and sociopolitical consciousness about the systemic and
systematic racism that Indigenous peoples faced when I planned the unit, the discovery
was nevertheless discomforting. I became even more motivated to keep pushing to
liberate them from the pitfalls of hegemony through using a counter hegemonic lens to
demonstrate how Indigenous peoples have been systematically marginalized in the
United States. This event was the catalyst to my shift from focusing on both cultural
competence and sociopolitical consciousness to mostly/only focusing on sociopolitical
consciousness in the unit because I inadvertently lost the thread of cultural competence,
and I was unaware of the shift at the time.
I asked students to research the true history of Thanksgiving further for
homework that night so that they could discover the actual history of the holiday that was
completely divergent from the common narrative. Students shared their discovery that
Thanksgiving originated as a way to celebrate European colonization and the
slaughtering of Indigenous peoples the next day. Many expressed verbal and written
outrage about not having been taught the true history behind Thanksgiving in their prior
schooling. In the conversation, we discussed reasons why this true knowledge of
Thanksgiving was intentionally not advertised, and I helped students understand how
doing so would challenge hegemonic narratives as it would paint White people in a
negative light. The goal of asking students to research the holiday’s more complete
history and discuss their findings was to help develop their sociopolitical consciousness
78

of how hegemony functions—it can completely submerge truth for a more accepted
reality. The actions that I took in helping students unearth the hegemony embedded
within Thanksgiving’s celebration in the United States emphasized Camangian’s (2015)
theory that liberatory teacher leaders expose historical contradictions that have created
harm toward historically marginalized peoples. Students’ research on Thanksgiving and
our discussion was the beginning of me applying a counter hegemonic lens to the holiday
from a predominantly sociopolitical consciousness perspective.
Given students’ new understanding of Thanksgiving’s atrocity and their
emotional reactions to the discovery, I expected them to think and act differently toward
Thanksgiving and demonstrate the transformation that Camangian (2015) theorizes
liberatory teacher leadership fosters. As a result, at the occurrence of Thanksgiving, I
provided students with two journal prompts intended to promote their reflection on the
holiday. The prompts asked students to reflect on their experience of celebrating
Thanksgiving in relation to the work they had previously done. The journal stated,
Journal response: Given what we learned about thanksgiving—how did you
approach this holiday / think of this holiday / time off differently? If you didn’t
think of it differently—why do you think that is?
Implied in the language of “what we learned” is the research that students did, the
Indigenous literature that we read, and the counter hegemonic lens that we applied to
Thanksgiving in prior discussions. The words “approach,” “think,” and “differently”
highlight my expectation for students’ thinking and behavior around celebrating
Thanksgiving to have transformed in a way that diverged from the dominant narrative.
“Differently” also showed that I was asking students to evaluate whether their thoughts
79

and actions were aligned with a counter hegemonic lens or complicit in continuing to
perpetuate Thanksgiving's harmful dominant narrative. I created an opportunity for
students to evaluate their progress of applying a counter hegemonic lens and dismantling
their own hegemonic thoughts about Thanksgiving through asking them to analyze their
thoughts and actions relating to the holiday. Consistent with Camangian, asking students
to be evaluative of their practices while also fostering opportunities for students to
interpret and discuss relevant actions that might lead to transformative change is a
liberatory act. The second journal question created an opportunity for students to
dismantle their own thoughts and move toward being transformed by asking them to
“think” about “why” they “didn’t think” “differently.” If students were able to be
metacognitive, and name and analyze why their thoughts and actions did not evolve to
favor a counter hegemonic lens, then I would have become acquainted with the
roadblocks that were slowing the development of their sociopolitical consciousness. In
having students study the racist history of Thanksgiving, and their own relationship to it,
I intended to make progress toward developing their sociopolitical consciousness;
however, my lack of focusing on the cultural aspects of Thanksgiving belabored this
progress. The activities and assignments that I used in my classroom in the study of
Indigenous literature demonstrated how I operationalized being a liberatory teacher
leader and worked to develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence. Although I intended to tackle both sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence, I found myself overtly focusing on sociopolitical consciousness, and only
partially accomplished my goal of being a liberatory teacher leader in these instances.

80

Conclusion
At the outset of the study, I set out to enact liberatory teacher leadership through
using a counter hegemonic lens to develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness and
cultural competence. However, I encountered limitations in writing and implementing a
curriculum that was liberatory because I predominantly only accounted for developing
students’ ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to develop their sociopolitical
consciousness. This was because I had sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence intertwined in my head and only teased them apart in the analysis of my data.
In addition, I predominantly focused on sociopolitical consciousness throughout the study
because it was the lens that I was most conscious of going into the study. I relied on the
texts written by historically marginalized authors I used in the course to build students’
cultural competence and bring them insight of their culture and the culture of others. I did
not focus on it as tacitly as sociopolitical consciousness because I assumed the content of
the curriculum would have automatically developed students’ cultural competence, which
it did to a certain extent. I also titled toward sociopolitical consciousness because it was
the first area that I noticed students lacked knowledge and I took it up with fidelity, and
inadvertently forgot giving cultural competence the same attention. However, because I
did not give cultural competence as much explicit attention, the presence of the
curriculum was not enough to lead the students to deeper cultural competence which was
needed for them to apply a counter hegemonic lens to the area of cultural competence.
The findings showed that it takes more than just a curriculum with historically
marginalized voices to be culturally relevant and enact liberatory teacher leadership. A
teacher must be equipped to use a counter hegemonic lens to extract and connect the
81

deeper meaning in those texts to students’ culture in order for the curriculum to serve its
purpose of developing both their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence
beyond a surface level. These implications were also demonstrated in the student growth
section.
Research Question 1, Part III: Students’ Growth
In this section, I am going to focus on where students grew in relation to what I
set out to accomplish in my research question: How do I create a space to support the
development and deepening of a counter hegemonic lens in students to develop and
deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence to explore structural
racism and hegemony that influences theirs and others’ individual experiences? I set out
to answer this question by cultivating students’ use of a counter hegemonic lens to
develop and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. Students
grew in the context of applying a counter hegemonic lens to deepen their sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence. However, following the pattern of my prior
themes, the growth in their sociopolitical consciousness was more substantive as the
assignments that I created were more geared toward this area. Consistent with my
conceptual framework, a counter hegemonic lens equips students to view the world from
a perspective where historically marginalized perspectives and experiences are valued
(Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014).
Sociopolitical consciousness is the awareness of the hegemonic systems and practices
that are at work in the local, national, and global settings that support those who have
privilege and encourages marginalization (Camangian, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014;
Santamaría, 2009), and cultural competence is the understanding and valuing of one’s
82

own cultural experiences and the cultural experiences of other racial groups (Ladson-
Billings, 1992; Paris & Alim, 2014). As students grew in their ability to enact a counter
hegemonic lens their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence grew.
Where They Started
In the beginning, students struggled to apply a counter hegemonic lens to
sociopolitical issues that were not related to their specific racial group. As a result, they
did not demonstrate having strong sociopolitical consciousness or cultural competence
about Indigenous history and cultural experiences. However, by the end of the semester,
when students were asked to research and present on sociopolitical issues that affected
their race and other racially marginalized groups, they demonstrated growth in their
ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to sociopolitical consciousness. Students grew
in their appreciation and valuing of other cultures, but they did not grow in applying a
counter hegemonic lens to cultural competence to dislodge prior hegemonic ideas that
they had about themselves or other cultures. Students demonstrated growth through the
thoughtful questions they asked and comments they stated during the presentations of
their final projects. The growth demonstrated that students had internalized the scaffolds
that I presented over the course of the semester to get to a place in their Zone of Proximal
Development (ZPD) where they could ask and answer rigorous sociopolitically conscious
and culturally competent questions from a counter hegemonic lens. Students’ growth in
these areas were essential to ensure they become liberated from the pitfalls of hegemony
and not reproduce hegemony in their daily lives, the ultimate goal of liberatory teacher
leadership (Brookfield, 2010; Camangian, 2015).
83

In this first section, I will analyze how although there was some evidence that
students had some sociopolitical knowledge of Thanksgiving’s history, their discourse
reproduced a hegemonic framework around Thanksgiving. Students’ responses
demonstrated that they had not yet internalized a counter hegemonic lens to build or
deepen their sociopolitical consciousness or culturally competent lens in their responses
to the Thanksgiving journal prompt. As previously explained, I provided this journal
prompt and asked the assistant questions as a way to leverage the current event of the
Thanksgiving holiday with our prior study of Thanksgiving’s history and Indigenous
literature. Students' responses at the time demonstrated that they were still grappling to
understand the importance of Thanksgivings history, see it from an alternative lens and
demonstrate a sociopolitical consciousness or cultural competence toward the holiday and
Indigenous history. The evidence is referenced below,
Journal response: Given what we learned about thanksgiving—how did you
approach this holiday / think of this holiday / time off differently? If you didn’t
think of it differently—why do you think that is?
Teacher: Okay, who would like to start us off with their discussion?
Alaina: We celebrate it as a day to celebrate family, and the blessings
received throughout the year
Alana: It's an excuse to eat an abnormal amount of food, gratitude has
never been associated with White colonist
Silas: It has evolved to being thankful for things and eating a lot
William: I acknowledge the history but didn’t preach to my family about it
84

Walter: We don’t think about it as White colonists but as a time for family
or friends?
Teacher: Is it problematic that we don’t think about the history as we
celebrate it? Why or Why not?”
William: It's important to think about the history because everyone don’t
know it. The only reason I didn't feel like telling my family the
history is that I felt like it was inconvenient.
Yair: I don’t think its problematic because we have derived a new
meaning. It’s celebrated so our family won't be abnormal so they
don’t feel abnormal, so, I don’t think it’s a dangerous thing.
Manny: I agree with what everyone has said. I don’t think the history
matters unless you want to cancel it. I don’t really see the problem
with not knowing the history of thanksgiving.
Teacher: Okay, other opinions?
No response from students.
Teacher: If we aren't going to do anything differently, then why learn about
culture/history?
Yair: It's important to know our actions, why we celebrate it and where it
came from, but it's not necessary for us to change the things we do
because of it
Teacher: If we aren't going to do anything differently, then why learn about
culture/history? It's an important question.
85

William: I think that it's important that we acknowledge the history and
don’t repeat our past mistakes
Manny: I agree with Yair
Stefano: I think it's important because it teaches us our past and where we
come from
Silas: I agree with Yair. Also changing the meaning of the holiday can be
considered doing it differently. By knowing what happened, you
shouldn't have to cancel the holiday. We should be informed of
what happened and we shouldn't celebrate what Columbus did.
Although there was some evidence that students had some awareness of Thanksgiving’s
history, their discourse reproduced a hegemonic framework around Thanksgiving. It was
hegemonic because students' prior knowledge about Thanksgiving did not cause them to
think or act differently toward the holiday. For example, Alana and Walter used language
such as “White colonists” that demonstrated the beginning of a counter hegemonic
framing and an awareness of some sociopolitical consciousness around Thanksgiving
history. Additionally, in his response, “I don’t think the history matters,” Manny
acknowledged that there was an alternative history to Thanksgiving. However, he
dismissed the history by saying it does not “matter,” and Alana and Walter did the same.
Walter continued to view the holiday “as a time for family or friends’ and Alana
continued to use the holiday as “an excuse to eat an abnormal amount of food,” even
though they acknowledged that history told him something different. Their actions
demonstrated that they did not have sufficient awareness of Thanksgiving’s negative
history to apply a counter hegemonic lens to be sociopolitically conscious toward
86

Indigenous peoples’ struggles. Consistent with Brookfield, Camangian, Ladson-Billings,
Paris and Alim, and Santamaría, sociopolitical consciousness is the awareness of the
hegemonic systems and practices that are at work in the local, national, and global setting
that support those who are privileged and encourages marginalization, and the awareness
of your own role and relationship with hegemony. And, a counter hegemonic lens equips
students to take action toward dismantling oppressive dominant White ideologies once
they become aware of said oppression. A student cannot take action toward celebrating
Thanksgiving from an alternative lens if they lack awareness and sufficient knowledge
about how and why the holiday is oppressive. Hence, students’ acknowledgement of
Thanksgivings’ history and perpetuation of hegemony in their thoughts and actions also
showed that they were unable to recognize their positionality in relation to the holiday
and their need to celebrate the holiday differently in order to disrupt the status quo.
Students struggled to demonstrate cultural competence because they lacked a
counter hegemonic understanding of Thanksgiving’s history and Indigenous peoples’
experiences. Consistent with Camangian, Ladson-Billings, and Paris and Alim, a counter
hegemonic lens equips students to view the world from a perspective where historically
marginalized perspectives and experiences are valued. In his response, Manny stated, “I
don’t think the history matters unless you want to cancel it.” The phrase “unless you want
to cancel it,” demonstrated a lack of a counter hegemonic lens because the student did not
demonstrate an understanding toward Thanksgiving's history or care toward how the
celebration of Thanksgiving yearly affected Indigenous peoples. The students’ defense of
perpetuating a hegemonic perspective toward Thanksgiving was a consistent theme in
their responses, which also showed that they lacked cultural competence toward
87

Indigenous people and Thanksgiving. Consistent with Ladson-Billings and Paris and
Alim, to be culturally competent, one must away have an understanding of the cultural
values and experiences of other racial groups besides their own. In stating, “I don’t think
its problematic because we have derived a new meaning,” Yair demonstrated a lack of
cultural competence. The phrase “derived a new meaning” showed that he subscribed to a
changed meaning of the holiday without sufficiently addressing the inherent harm of the
holiday on Indigenous peoples. The students’ responses did not demonstrate an ability to
be empathetic toward Indigenous peoples. They demonstrated a lack of cultural
competence because they demonstrated insensitivity toward Indigenous history, culture
and experiences. These responses demonstrated that at the time of the journal, students
were still novices at applying a counter hegemonic lens to deepen their cultural
competence about races or cultures that were not directly related to their own. However,
after several discussions, models, the use of specific assistant questions and rigorous
assignments, students grew in their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence.
The next section will discuss how students’ questions and comments demonstrated their
growth in the areas I set out to deepen overtime.
Where They Ended
Students grew in their development of applying a counter hegemonic lens to
sociopolitical issues affecting historically marginalized racial groups. This growth
resulted in the growth of their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence.
They demonstrated this growth in the questions they asked and comments they made to
each other during their presentations of their final project. I asked students to research a
sociopolitical issue that affected multiple historically marginalized races in their family
88

or community. In their presentations, students were asked to identify the gap between
how the racial issue was perpetuated in the United States today, and how they would like
the issue to look in their ideal world. Students were expected to leave time for questions
during the presentations, and students were expected to ask questions of each other. The
excerpt of the discourse below shows students’ growth in their sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence,
Cory: What's the difference between systemic and systematic racism?
Tao: Would you think something bad might happen to the economy if
he plans to do make the economy fair?
Silas: How does the president plan to make the economy equal?
Yamileth: He plans to include everyone and give everyone a fair chance to
succeed economically.
…
Hector: How can we make people aware of the social wealth gap?
Walter: Why did you choose this topic, and also I liked all of the graphs
you used
Noe: Do you think in the near future the wealth gap will be less than it is
today?
Arturo: To answer Josiah's question, you can do this by spreading more
information about it online
Stefano: Why do you think this wealth gap between minority races and
whites is present.
89

Arturo: Walter, I was more interested in the more economic aspect of
systemic racism and so I chose it as my topic
Arturo: Noe, I think it could potentially get better due to recent events like
the BLM movement and how people's voices are being heard about
these problems
Arturo: Stefano, I think the wealth gap comes from white people setting up
these types of policies to help white people more than minorities
and not give them enough resources
The students’ questions to each other demonstrated an internalization of a counter
hegemonic lens and the development of their sociopolitical consciousness. Their
questions and comments demonstrated a growth in their understanding of their
relationship to hegemony. Hector’s question, “How can we make people aware of the
social wealth gap?” demonstrated an acquiring of a counter hegemonic perspective of
looking at the wealth gap and a growth in his sociopolitical consciousness. The phrase
“make people aware” is counter hegemonic because it goes against the status quo that
those who have power and money have established to keep historically marginalized
people ignorant about the inner workings of the wealth gap. Hector’s suggestion of
raising awareness in itself is counter hegemonic; however; the fact he also gave himself a
responsibility of taking action and not just leaving it to the presenter demonstrated a
growth in sociopolitical consciousness. A major goal of sociopolitical consciousness is to
make a person recognize their own positionality to the oppressive hegemonic systems at
work in the local or global settings (Brookfield, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris &
Alim, 2014). The phrase “How can we” in Hector’s response embodied this goal because
90

it demonstrated that he recognized that the wealth gap affected him, and he also
recognized that he had a part to play in disrupting the wealth gap for himself and others.
His recognition that something needed to be done to disrupt the perpetuation of the
wealth gap was also a demonstration of students’ growth in sociopolitical consciousness.
Students’ growth in their ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to sociopolitical
issues also resulted in the improvement of their cultural competence.
Students’ questions and responses to each other demonstrated a growth in their
ability to understand and empathize with the cultural experiences of historically
marginalized people in the United States. Through applying a counter hegemonic lens to
interrogate the wealth gap, students were able to unearth how hegemony has created a
culture of resistance for historically marginalized people in the United States. In his
question, “Why do you think this wealth gap between minority races and whites is
present?” Stefano demonstrated an understanding of the cultural experiences of
historically marginalized peoples that was formed by the wealth gap. The wealth gap has
created and perpetuated a state of poverty for ‘minority races” in the United States, which
has led to and perpetuated their “minority” status and social experience in the United
States. The fact that Stefano questioned why the gap existed and not if it existed
demonstrated that he had an awareness of the wealth gap, and at the very least, an
understanding that it created a disadvantage between “minority races” and “Whites.”
These aspects of his responses demonstrated that he was applying a counter hegemonic
lens to interrogate the cultural experiences of historically marginalized groups that was
perpetuated by the wealth gap. This response also demonstrated that the student was
91

aware that there were cultural experiences, especially those relating to economics, that
these two groups experienced from a different perspective because of the wealth gap.
By becoming culturally competent, students were able to appreciate and value
historically marginalized cultures. In his response, Arturo demonstrated cultural
competence by demonstrating the value of African American experiences in the United
States. In his statement, “Noe, I think it could potentially get better due to recent events
like the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement and how people’s voices are being heard
about these problems,” he demonstrated an understanding of the African American
culture of resistance in the United States. In acknowledging that the BLM protests had a
potential to positively impact all minority races, the student demonstrated an
understanding of the interconnected cultural experiences of historically marginalized
people in the United States. This recognition of the similarity between historically
marginalized experiences demonstrated a growth in students’ cultural competence
because they got to the point where they were able to identify similar experiences across
multiple races, and appreciate the power of those cultural experiences to push against the
status quo and inform societal change. The overall growth in students’ ability to apply a
counter hegemonic lens to build their cultural competence of historically marginalized
races was minor because in their responses, students only got to a place of generally
interrogating, recognizing and unearthing the hegemony that the wealth gap had
perpetuated for historically marginalized peoples’ culture in the United States.
Conclusion
As stated earlier, the way that I set up my curriculum and enacted liberatory
teacher leadership played a role in how far students were able to get in their pursuance of
92

deeper sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. In the next section, I will
also discuss how my use of assistant questions to develop students’ sociopolitical
consciousness and cultural competence produced the consistent results of me getting
further in sociopolitical consciousness than cultural competence because I kept a
sociopolitical focus throughout the entire study.
Research Question 1, Part IV: My Growth
In this section, I am going to focus on where I grew over the course of my study,
and where I grew is in the context of assistant questions, which are a form of assistive
means. Assistant questions are questions that activate students’ mental and verbal
cognition through inviting them to demonstrate their learning audibly and in writing
(Tharp & Gallimore, 1998). Through sharing their thoughts, the teacher is able to first,
recognize where students are in their ZPD, which is the distance between what a learner
can do independently and what they can do with assistance (Tharp & Gallimore, 1998).
Second, the teacher is able to assist and regulate students’ understanding and deepening
of the content to help them approach mastery (Tharp & Gallimore, 1998). When used
effectively in classroom discourse, assistant questions create rigor because they promote
critical thinking, construction of knowledge and allow for extension and elaboration of
ideas between students (Matsumura et al., 2008; Tharp & Gallimore, 1998). I used
assistant questions with the purpose of promoting critical thinking, and enabling students
to engage in the construction, extension and elaboration of knowledge to enact liberatory
teacher leadership through improving students’ use of a counter hegemonic lens to build
and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence.

93

Where I Started
As discussed in the previous theme, from the very beginning of the semester, I
had an essential question, “How does the past shape our present and future?” that framed
my curriculum and pedagogical moves. After the close reading and inspection of Black,
Indigenous, Asian, and Latino literature, this question evolved to become, “How has the
past influenced the present and future for historically marginalized peoples in America?”
This updated question added the specific focus of race to my instruction that I said I
would focus on in my course overview, creating a common thread that ran through the
curriculum and activities. I asked students to answer this essential question through
teaching them how to develop, deepen and apply a counterhegemonic lens in order to
build and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence around
Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latino literature, culture and history. The assignments and
assistant questions in this section were intended to accomplish these acts. However, in the
beginning of my data collection, I implemented assistant questions that were impromptu.
My impromptu implementation produced questions that were unclear, and abstract. As a
result, these questions were less aligned to the assignment they were intended to support,
the essential question, and students’ ZPD. Hence, these assistant questions only
somewhat enabled the extension and elaboration of knowledge in the area of
sociopolitical consciousness, and they predominantly reinforced hegemonic ideas, falling
short of the rigor that I intended to accomplish by being a liberatory teacher leader.
Cultural competence was not a major theme that surfaced in my analysis of my assistant
questions because outside of my text selection, I approached it as an afterthought in
comparison to sociopolitical consciousness. As I progressed in the study, I grew in my
94

implementation by backward planning my assistant questions. This new approach
resulted in questions that were clear, specific to the assignment, aligned to the essential
question, and scaffolded to match students’ ZPD. However, these planned assistant
questions still only had the potential to deepen students’ sociopolitical consciousness
because I did not use them to also develop or deepen their cultural competence. My
forsaking of cultural competence affected the depth of sociopolitical consciousness I was
able to build with my questions because both lenses were needed to enact liberatory
teacher leadership, raise awareness of and dislodge hegemonic systems, and accomplish
the rigor I was after in the assignment.
In this next section, I will analyze how my impromptu use of assistant questions
in a class discussion to help students analyze a pre-planned written assignment impacted
their ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to build their sociopolitical consciousness
around Thanksgiving. As discussed in a prior theme, I asked students to complete a free
response journal on how they celebrated Thanksgiving in light of our studying of
Thanksgiving’s history and reading of Indigenous literature because I wanted to see if
they reproduced hegemony or applied a counter hegemonic approach. The evidence
below is an excerpt from this discourse,
Journal response: Given what we learned about thanksgiving—how did you
approach this holiday / think of this holiday / time off differently? If you didn’t
think of it differently—why do you think that is?
Teacher: Okay, who would like to start us off with their discussion?
Alaina: We celebrate it as a day to celebrate family, and the blessings
received throughout the year
95

Alana: It's an excuse to eat an abnormal amount of food, gratitude has
never been associated with White colonist
Silas: It has evolved to being thankful for things and eating a lot
William: I acknowledge the history but didn’t preach to my family about it
Walter: We don’t think about it as White colonists but as a time for family
or friends?
In their responses to the journal prompt, students mentioned that they had not done
anything differently in their celebration of the holiday. They “celebrate[d] family,” “ate
an abnormal amount of food,” and expressed “gratitude” for “the blessings received
throughout the year.” While Alana and Walter used language such as “White colonists”
that demonstrated the beginning of a counter hegemonic framing and an awareness of
sociopolitical consciousness, they stayed within a hegemonic framework in their
responses. They also celebrated the holiday in ways that matched the status quo. Given
that I did not hear responses that I interpreted as demonstrating a counter hegemonic lens
or sociopolitical consciousness, I asked the first assistant question. My quick and
impromptu asking of the first question had implications for the ways that my students
were able to engage in the kind of discourse I intended. The evidence below is an excerpt
from this discourse,
Teacher: Is it problematic that we don’t think about the history as we
celebrate it? Why or Why not?”
William: It's important to think about the history because everyone don’t
know it. The only reason I didn’t feel like telling my family the
history is that I felt like it was inconvenient.
96

Yair: I don’t think its problematic because we have derived a new
meaning. It’s celebrated so our family won’t be abnormal so they
don’t feel abnormal, so, I don’t think it’s a dangerous thing.
Manny: I agree with what everyone has said. I don’t think the history
matters unless you want to cancel it. I don’t really see the problem
with not knowing the history of Thanksgiving.
Teacher: Okay, other opinions?
No response from students.
Teacher: If we aren’t going to do anything differently, then why learn about
culture/history?
Yair: It's important to know our actions, why we celebrate it and where it
came from, but it’s not necessary for us to change the things we do
because of it
Teacher: If we aren’t going to do anything differently, then why learn about
culture / history? It’s an important question.
William: I think that it’s important that we acknowledge the history and
don’t repeat our past mistakes
Manny: I agree with Yair
Stefano: I think it’s important because it teaches us our past and where we
come from
Silas: I agree with Yair. Also changing the meaning of the holiday can be
considered doing it differently. By knowing what happened, you
97

shouldn’t have to cancel the holiday. We should be informed of
what happened and we shouldn’t celebrate what Columbus did.
My quick reaction to ask students an assistant question resulted in me moving on from
the journal without a full understanding of where students’ ZPD was because I did not
deeply analyze the complexity of their language. The question “Is it problematic that we
don’t think about the history as we celebrate it?” implied that students were not thinking
of Thanksgiving’s history although most students said they thought about its history, and
some demonstrated an awareness of its history by using terms such as “White colonists,”
in their responses. This mismatch between my question and students’ responses occurred
because I did not recognize that students’ actual performance demonstrated some counter
hegemonic thinking. Hence, I asked a question that was outside of students’ ZPD. My
question did not account for where students were in their sociopolitical knowledge and
what they had the potential to accomplish with my support. Although my assistant
question was intended to provoke an internalization of Thanksgiving’s prior history, and
a development of students’ ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to Thanksgiving, I
asked a close ended yes or no question that got them further away from the rigor I
intended as the question did not require elaboration. These factors contributed to the
question’s inability to push students toward their potential of uncovering the hegemony in
their responses and make progress in developing the sociopolitical knowledge to answer
the essential question deeply.
The first assistant question was vague and lacked rigor. I did not relate the phrase
“the history” directly back to Thanksgiving, which prevented students from seeing the
relationship between the question and the assignment, and made it harder for them to
98

analyze the question, and by virtue, interrogate Thanksgiving’s history in depth. My
vague framing kept students in the same place within their development of applying a
counter hegemonic lens to Thanksgiving and being sociopolitically conscious. This effect
is demonstrated by the fact that students’ responses mirrored the depth of my question,
and were also vague. Statements such as “it’s important to think about the history” and “I
don’t think the history matters” demonstrated that they only referenced, instead of
analyzing or interrogating the history of Thanksgiving in their responses. As
demonstrated by the qualities I highlighted, the first question was inconsistent with what
a real assistant question is meant to do. Consistent with Tharp and Gallimore and
Matsumura et al., a real assistant question promotes critical thinking, construction of
knowledge and allows for verbal extension and elaboration. I was unable to ask an
adequate assistant question that directly connected back to the assignment and the
essential question because I was unprepared. As a result, the questions did not prepare
students to accomplish the intended task of the assignment or progress in their
development of their sociopolitical conscious knowledge or use of a counter hegemonic
lens.
The second question that asked, “Why or Why not?” augmented the first question
because it required some elaboration and promoted the investigation of students’
hegemonic thinking that I was after in the lesson. For example, after William shared out
on his own experience of not talking about Thanksgiving to his family because it felt
“inconvenient,” Yair added his own thoughts about why his family still celebrated
Thanksgiving in sharing, “it’s celebrated so our family won't be abnormal so they don’t
feel abnormal." Together, the first two questions set students up to share their current
99

knowledge about how thanksgiving was hegemonic audibly and build off of each other’s
thoughts. Although there was some evidence that students engaged in extension and
elaboration, their discourse reproduced a hegemonic framework around Thanksgiving
because they resorted back to the status quo celebration, and I did not efficiently scaffold
them to get further along in the development of a counter hegemonic framework and
sociopolitical knowledge. Combined, the first two questions promoted student responses
of various sociopolitical depths and clarity that reproduced hegemony because the first,
and main question, was outside of students’ ZPD and not sufficiently attending to the
assignment or essential question. I did not ask assistant questions that sufficiently
scaffolded the prior questions. As a result, the questions continued to fall outside of
students’ ZPD.
The third question, "Okay, other opinions?” did not provide an opportunity for
students to build or expand their knowledge of Thanksgiving because it was a solicitation
instead of an assistant question that directly connected to the assignment or interrogated
their previous responses. As a result, it did not assist students’ sense making in any way
because it was outside of students ’ZPD. Consistent with Tharp and Gallimore, assistant
questions elicit verbal responses that show students’ current knowledge. No students
responded to this question, demonstrating that the question was outside of their ZPDs as
it did not help them construct counter hegemonic knowledge on Thanksgiving in order to
progress toward answering developing the sociopolitical consciousness necessary to
answer the essential question. This question also lacked structure and rigor. By not using
an assistant question to interrogate students’ previous responses, I missed an opportunity
to help them apply a counter hegemonic lens to uncover the hegemony that was
100

perpetuated in the discourse, and interceded the opportunity to help develop their
sociopolitical consciousness in the process. Following this question, I asked a fourth
question that only slightly related to the first two questions in content and possessed the
same deficiencies as the prior questions.
The fourth question was conclusive. I observed that the way students celebrated
Thanksgiving did not change despite learning about its destructive history in a prior class
so I asked “If we aren’t going to do anything differently, then why learn about
culture/history?” to interrogate students’ actions. I conclusively told students that they
“aren’t going to do anything differently,” instead of interrogating the barriers that
prevented them from celebrating Thanksgiving differently. The conclusive nature of the
question removed an opportunity for students to construct their own knowledge and
adequately interrogate their own relationship to celebrating Thanksgiving. This fault can
be seen in that not only was Silas the only student who addressed the first part of the
question, but his response also reinforced the hegemonic ideas about Thanksgiving that
was present in the discourse from the beginning. He stated, “also changing the meaning
of the holiday can be considered doing it differently.” “Changing the meaning of the
holiday” was an example of erasure and counterproductive to disrupting hegemony. If I
had interrogated students’ previous responses by asking an assistant question that related
to and interrogated their responses, then the question would have fallen within students’
ZPD and pushed them toward applying an alternative lens of analysis. Instead, the
conclusive question set students up to perpetuate hegemony because it emphasized not
“doing anything differently” about how they celebrated Thanksgiving. As a result,
students remained in the same place in their development of a counter hegemonic lens
101

and their sociopolitical knowledge that they started with in the discourse. These features
made the assistant fall short of adding rigor to the lesson, and developing the skills and
knowledge students needed in order to progress in answering the essential question.
Not only was the question conclusive, but it was also abstract. It did not explicitly
connect back to the language from the journal, previous assistant questions or previous
responses. The abstraction can be seen in the phrase “why learn about
culture/history?” “Culture/history” left room for various interpretations from students
because it did not specify the specific cultures or history they should be referencing in
their responses. Such specification would have created context for students, which would
have also helped them provide more specific answers. This can be seen in phrases such as
“don’t repeat our past mistakes” and “it teaches us our past and where we come from”
where students did not address the context of Thanksgiving. The broad question once
again took them outside of their ZPDs because it did not provide them with a specific
lens of analysis that would have helped them develop the skills to apply a counter
hegemonic lens to Thanksgiving and make progress toward answering the essential
question.
Consistent with Tharp and Gallimore and Matsumura et al., assistant questions
create rigor by promoting critical thinking, construction of knowledge and allow for
extension and elaboration of ideas between students. My assistant questions did the
opposite of this at the beginning of my study. They were abstract, conclusive, did not
connect or build off of each other explicitly, and did not accomplish the rigor they were
intended to in the lesson by connecting back to the journal prompt or the essential
question. All of these elements made it difficult for me to be a liberatory teacher leader
102

who pushed against hegemony because the questions lacked overall depth, and were
solely sociopolitical conscious based when they did have some substance. However, with
careful planning, I grew in my construction and implementation of assistant questions,
and I was able to use them as a means to assist the development of students’ counter
hegemonic perspective and sociopolitical consciousness. In the next section, I will
discuss how I moved more successfully from a pre-written assignment to asking assistant
questions that set students up to apply a counter hegemonic lens and deepen their
sociopolitical consciousness.
Where I Ended
I grew in my implementation of assistant questions by intentionally planning clear
assistant questions that were rigorous, built off of each other and aligned with students’
ZPD to help them complete the assignment and deepen their sociopolitical consciousness
around racial issues in the United States. The assignment below was a written summative
assignment that I gave students at the end of our study of historically marginalized
peoples’ literature. Consistent with Tharp and Gallimore and Matsumura et al., the
questions in this assignment were more effective in helping students apply a counter
hegemonic lens to develop their sociopolitical consciousness because they were clearly
structured to enable the extension and elaboration of students’ knowledge of racial issues
in the United States. The assignment description is listed below,
Thematic Essential Question: How has the past influenced the present and
future for historically marginalized peoples in America?
For your final project this semester, you will be creating a document/product that
answers the essential question that you can present to your community. You will
103

have to pick a specific socio-political issue that affects multiple racial/ethnic
historically marginalized groups (2-3) in your family, community, school or
country and discuss how the past has affected the present and future for these
historically marginalized groups.
Part 1: Gap Analysis—Ideal vs. Reality
1. What would race look like in your ideal world? Would it even exist? Why
or why not?
2. How far is the current reality from the ideal state? (emphasis in original)
The assistant question “What would race look like in your ideal world?” supported
students’ continued development of sociopolitical consciousness because it was specific
and connected to students’ prior knowledge. The word “race,” offered students a clear
framework for selecting a sociopolitical issue, and decreased the possibility of students
picking a topic that was outside of the context I intended. Embedded in the first question
is the fact that race did not function in a positive way in the United States. This meaning
is evident due to the juxtaposition or the words “race” and “ideal” in the question, which
when combined with the phrase “affects multiple racial/ethnic historically marginalized
groups,” from the assignment description, emphasized that race was leveraged as a means
of marginalization in this country. The connotations of these words were aimed toward
getting students to think about race and racial issues from an alternative perspective so
that they can become more sociopolitically conscious about how the construction of race
reproduced hierarchies, forms of marginalization and exclusion in the United States. The
highlighted words and phrases also emphasized the clear thread that ran through the
assistant question, the assignment, and the course description where I stated my intention
104

to focus on how race perpetuated marginalization in the course. Not only was the
assistant question a scaffold for completing the assignment and answering the essential
question, but the first three questions were also scaffolded in rigor.
The three questions “What would race look like in your ideal world? Would it
even exist? Why or why not?” had varied degrees of rigor. They scaffolded each other
and allowed for the expansion and elaboration of students’ ideas on the construction of
race from multiple perspectives. Consistent with Matsumura et al. and Tharp and
Gallimore, effective assistant questions create rigor by promoting critical thinking, and
allowing for extension and elaboration of ideas. Although, “Would it even exist?” was a
yes or no question that required little elaboration, the other two questions required
elaboration of various depths. The first question, “What would race look like in your
ideal world?” tapped into students’ current knowledge and current understandings of
race. It asked them to consider what race currently looked like, consider what their ideal
world would look like, and then make sense of these two ideas from the perspective of
racial equality and equity. In order to answer the question, students had to apply a
counterhegemonic lens to race because the word “ideal” asked them to consider that there
was an alternative way of looking at race beyond the oppressive one that has been
executed in our country over centuries. Through comparing the ideal and reality, the
question’s structure provided students with the opportunity to deepen their sociopolitical
consciousness about race. The last question, “Why or why not?” also pushed students
toward deeper analysis because it asked for elaboration, expansion and evidence to
support their thoughts.
105

The fourth assistant question was also an extension of the first set of questions,
and increased the rigor of the assignment. “How far is the current reality from the ideal
state?” built off of the first three questions and deepened the rigor of the assignment. It
asked students to go from stating their opinion of what race would like in an ideal world,
to investigating and evaluating the racial structures in the United States. The need for this
thorough investigation is embedded within the diction and content of the question. In
order for students to be able to speak intelligently about what caused the gap between the
“ideal” and “current reality” of race relations in the United States, they needed to be able
to identify both “the ideal” and the “current reality” and support their answers with
evidences. By carrying out this investigation, the students would have been pushed to
confront the hegemonic systems that were perpetuated by race in the United States, and
by virtue deepen their sociopolitical consciousness by being able to locate and name the
gap. By asking “how far" the gap between the “ideal” and ‘current reality” of racial
marginalization in the United States were away from each other, I also used the assistant
question to attend to the prompt and essential question that asked them to discuss the
future and the present realities for historically marginalized people in this country. The
embedded and gradual scaffolding of these assistant questions showed that I was
attending to students’ ZPD because I asked assistant questions of various levels so that all
students could access and complete the assignment regardless of their current knowledge.
Answering any of the questions would have helped students make progress toward
answering the essential question and complete the assignment. The clarity of the assistant
questions combined with their rigor, connection to the assignment and alignment with
students’ ZPD prepared students to apply a counter hegemonic lens and deepen their
106

sociopolitical consciousness around a specific racial topic and think about its implication
for multiple historically marginalized groups in the United States, a liberatory teacher
leadership act.
Conclusion
I had many intentions related to being a liberatory teacher leader who used a
counter hegemonic lens to build students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural
competence for this project. I also intended to develop my own pedagogical skills that
were outlined in my conceptual framework. I was able to create conditions for students to
grow in the deepening of their sociopolitical consciousness and the development of their
cultural competence. Similarly, I was able to grow in my use of assistant questions to
help students also grow in those two specific areas. Students’ progress was a reflection of
my progress, as we both grew in the area of sociopolitical consciousness and made less
progress in the area of cultural competence. There was one other aspect of my conceptual
framework that was noticeably absent from my findings, namely, critical reflection. I did
not spend as much time critically reflecting on my own or students’ identity, positionality
and funds of knowledge or my pedagogical moves while in the field to truly achieve the
transformation in my own teaching and students’ knowledge that I was after. This lack of
consistent and effective critical reflection during and in between data collection cycles to
help me analyze my data and make better pedagogical choices in the classroom
contributed to the lack of greater success in enacting liberatory teacher leadership, and
accounting for more elements of my conceptual framework in my findings. However, I
am proud of the progress I accomplished during my first iteration of my conceptual
framework and project.
107

Afterword
In this final section, I will discuss retrospective takeaways from conducting this
action research and the ways that this process has continued to inform my growth as a
teacher. I will use the sections below to discuss my visceral reaction to being done with
my dissertation and how I was affected emotionally by the process, the evolution of my
understanding of critical reflection, pedagogical changes I have made in my
implementation of my curriculum for the 2021-2022 school year, and how I hope to use
the knowledge I have gathered from my dissertation in the future.
Visceral Reaction to Being Done
At the time of my defense, I would have spent 3 years and 7 months of writing,
reading or thinking about my Ed.D., and consequently, my dissertation. My only way to
make sense of the end of this process was related in a text to a fellow classmate where I
stated, “it feels like my baby is growing up.” Upon first mention, this text seemed to
make complete sense because it seemed obvious that the baby that was growing up was
my dissertation. But upon further thinking, I’ve come to realize that the baby who has
grown up is me. The baby is my faith, my perseverance, my determination, my ability to
take Ls and bounce back in the next meeting, my... my... my... You can go ahead and fill
in the blanks for yourself now. Nothing about this process has been easy, but in the end, I
have grown to love it. I have grown to love talking about and using the terms counter
hegemonic, sociopolitical consciousness, and cultural competence every opportunity that
I have. These are terms that I use in my personal relationships, professional relationships
and anyone who will listen to me relationships. Anyone who has met me in the last few
years know that I am writing a dissertation on something that has to do with culturally
108

relevant pedagogy, and if they know me very well, they can now define and provide an
example of hegemony. To have written, and partaken in this dissertation process was
simply put, a process of strength. When the winds of heart break came, I withstood.
When the howls of death came, I withstood. When the fear of another depression cycle
came, ran through me like a hurricane, and left me to pick up the debris of my mind and
sanity, I withstood. And when the aftershocks came, I shook and rumbled, but I was
determined to not fall again. Determined. There we go with that loaded, impossible for
me to actually completely define, word again. This was a bumpy journey. Exhausting at
times, and frustrating to say the least, but throughout it, I learned to appreciate the taken
for granted gentleness of exhaling another breath; a breath that blew in new faith, new
found love, new job opportunities, new analytical skills, new endings and new
beginnings. To say it feels good for it all to come to an end would be a half truth,
currently, because in fact, I would love to have an excuse to curl up and write one more
page, schedule one more meeting, and watch one more debrief video so that I don’t have
to truly face the reality of what comes with being done and the title of Dr. As I have said
from the beginning, completing this dissertation has been my dream, my parents’ dream
for me, and overtime it has become everyone who knows and loves me dream for me, and
finally I can say that I did it, and admit that I did it for me. For my lost hope, for my
stolen experiences, for the time I will never get back, and for the sentences that still do
not make sense after several rounds of edits. This baby inside of me is ready to leave its
nest, and now it’s time to show the world my best.
To: Dr. Shareesa
From: Dr. Shareesa
109

March 9, 2020
8:00PM
Evolution of my Critical Reflections
This was my first time creating a culturally relevant curriculum that was
specifically tied to being a liberatory teacher leader and using a counter hegemonic lens
to develop students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. While I was
able to make progress, I underestimated the role critical reflection played in helping me
develop the high cognitive capacity needed to design and implement a curriculum to
achieve such rigorous goals. While in the field, I conducted reflections out of necessity
rather than out of an understanding of their integral role in the action research process. I
also predominantly conducted descriptive reflections, and while they were useful in
painting a picture of what was happening during my lessons in real time, they did not
account for some of the higher cognitive considerations that I needed to apply to my
lessons such as considering the role of my identity and positionality and the way it
influenced my teaching and interactions with students. As a result of this lack of fidelity
in the critical reflection process, I was successful at implementing the different
pedagogical moves that I identified in my conceptual framework; however, I was less
successful at implementing them to the depth required to achieve my ultimate goal of
developing students’ sociopolitical consciousness and critical consciousness to take steps
toward dismantling hegemony in their personal lives and local settings. By minimizing
the role and importance of critical reflections, I also minimized my opportunity to grow
while in the field. A lot of my learning and my ability to truly see my data occurred in the
retrospective framings when I used the literature and my committee chair to help me
110

interrogate my data and draw conclusions about what I intended versus what I actually
executed in the field. This experience has influenced the way that I now approach critical
reflections.
This time around, I involve my adviser in my reflection process. We talk about
my questions, the topics that come up during class discussions, my wins, and my
mistakes soon after these moments happen, and I use the information gathered from our
debriefs to plan and implement my instruction the next day. Teaching the same
curriculum, and having structured time to meet with my committee chair has provided me
with an unparalleled opportunity to truly reflect on my practice in real time, and it
continues to grow and develop my liberatory teacher leadership abilities. In fact, I am
actually enjoying the iterative nature of the action research cycle more now because I
have a better understanding of how the whole process works, and I have time to allow the
process to do its job of developing my practice without specific deadlines hanging over
me. Despite my frequent lamentations during the writing process, I have also expressed
to my committee several times that I did not want the dissertation learning process to end
because I have enjoyed and valued the work. Now that I get to teach the same courses as
I did last year, I have come to understand that the work that I have done for the last 2
years truly does not have to end, it can become my life work. The dissertation process has
given me something that I have never had before in my schooling, a focus.
Evolution of Pedagogical Moves
I currently have the pleasure of implementing aspects of my dissertation and
conceptual framework as an English teacher in my Minority Perspectives course. I use
the same curriculum that I taught in my 10
th
and 12
th
grade classes last year as my
111

curriculum for my Minority Perspectives course this year. Every day, we read some of
the same texts that I read with my students last year and have some of the same
discussions, but there have been two major changes. One, I actually know what I am
doing now, and two, I have more structure. This year, I implemented the curriculum with
more thought, and I wrote specific analytical questions that targeted cultural competence
and sociopolitical consciousness equally that we use daily to analyze the texts in the
course. This repeated use of one set of analytical questions has created a way for students
to reflect on their own identity and culture and not only compare it to others, but to also
understand how the structures of hegemony, in some ways, affect historically
marginalized people equally. The existence of the analytical questions has created an
analytical structure and scaffold that my prior teaching of this content lacked. These
guiding questions have provided students with the specific analytical lenses that they
need to progress in the course, and they also serve as my assistant questions. And since
they are planned with my students in mind, these questions are also within students’
ZPDs. I am proud of the work I am doing as a liberatory teacher leader because I know
that I am creating a structured space to have the necessary conversations about the
sociopolitical and cultural issues that are relevant to all my students’ lives.
Future Endeavors
I am looking to branch out of teaching high school students and also take up
teaching and working with adults as a literacy coach in the next school year. I think I
have gathered valuable content knowledge and professional experience over the last 2
years of constructing and implementing my culturally relevant curriculum that I can use
to support my colleagues. I have already started this work informally as a member of our
112

school’s Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) support group this school year. I meet
with teachers, coach them through lesson plans, and walk them through my own
experiences of teaching my curriculum. I hope to expand on this coaching work in a more
structured capacity, and to get the opportunity to use the findings of my dissertation to
support my work. In doing so, I will revisit the andragogical/adaptive leadership concepts
that I removed from my current conceptual framework because I dropped my second
research question. I also hope to continue teaching content that relates to culturally
relevant pedagogy in the future. I look forward to continuing to grow and expand on my
culturally relevant knowledge, and I think that the only way to do so is to submerge
myself in the work as a teacher and teacher leader and reflect on my instruction
constantly. Better yet, reflecting with others who have more experience or are in the same
boat as me would be an invaluable practice for the future, so I hope to create a small
learning community with members from my thematic dissertation group, and to also
continue to draw on the help of my committee chair for advice when needed. Going
through the process with a team has shown me that having people who have your back in
a field that can be lonely is invaluable, and so I hope to be able to provide this same
support to my friends and colleagues in small learning communities.
A final thought that I had during the writing of my dissertation was, what does
this culturally relevant work look like in a global setting? As an immigrant and avid
traveler, I have always had the desire to also improve the educational systems outside of
the United States. Hence, I am extremely curious about the impact that also immersing
myself in culture-based education will have on my teaching and coaching. I want to do
this work so that I can first, grow in my understanding of more cultural nuances and
113

intersectionality, and then eventually use the knowledge that I have gained to help
transform other peoples’ lives. The end of this dissertation signals the beginning of my
life work, and I look forward to the challenges, knowing that in the end, as this process
have already shown me, the growth and reflection required to be a liberatory teacher
leader is without a doubt worth it.

114

References
A Review of California's Compulsory Education Laws. Legislative Analyst’s Office.
(2004).
https://lao.ca.gov/2004/compulsory_ed/020304_compulsory_education_laws.htm.
Anderson, J. D. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South: 1860-1935. Univ. of North
Carolina Press.
AP Score Distributions. (2019). Retrieved May 11, 2020, from
https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
Bear, C. (2008, May 12). American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many. NPR.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865.
Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (2007). Qualitative research for education: an
introduction to theory and methods (5th ed.). Pearson.
Brookfield, S. (2010). Critical reflection as an adult learning process. In Lyons, N.
(ed.) Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing
for professional reflective inquiry. Springer.
Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2
nd
ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Burris, C. C., & Welner, K. G. (2005). Closing the achievement gap by detracking. Phi
Delta Kappan, 86(8), 594–598. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170508600808
Camangian, P. R. (2015). Teach Like Lives Depend on It. Urban Education, 50(4), 424–
453. doi: 10.1177/004208591351459
Coghlan, D. (2019). Doing action research in your own organization (5
th
ed.). Sage
Publications.
115

College/Career Readiness Calculation. CA Department of Education.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/cm/ccical.asp.
Downer, J. T., Goble, P., Myers, S. S., & Pianta, R. C. (2016). Teacher-child racial/ethnic
match within pre-kindergarten classrooms and children’s early school
adjustment. Early Childhood Research Quarterly,37, 26-38.
doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.02.007
Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world: How America’s commitment to equity will
determine our future. Teachers College Press.
Elmore, R. (2002). Bridging the gap between standards and achievement: The imperative
for professional development in education. The Albert Shanker Institute.
http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/Bridging_Gap.pdf
Flores, O. J. (2018). (Re)constructing the language of the achievement gap to an
opportunity gap. Journal of School Leadership, 28(3), 344–373. doi:
10.1177/105268461802800304
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
Friedlaender, D., Burns, D., Lewis-Charp, H., Cook-Harvey, C. M., Zheng, X., &
Darling-Hammond, L. (2014). Student-centered schools: Closing the opportunity
gap. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.
Garrett, H. J., & Segall, A. (2015). (Re)Considerations of ignorance and resistance in
teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(4), 294-304.
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching theory, research, and practice [google
116

books] (3rd ed.). Retrieved from
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culturally_Responsive_Teaching/uD9qD
wAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Glesne, C. (2011). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction, 4th ed. Pearson.
Gorski, P. (2017). Reaching and teaching students in poverty. Teachers College Press.
Hallett, R., & Venegas, K. (2011). Is increased access enough? Advanced placement
courses, quality, and success in low-income urban schools. Journal for the
Education of the Gifted, 34(3), 468–487. doi:10.1177/016235321103400305
Harding, J. (2015). Qualitative data analysis from start to finish. Sage Publications.

Heckman, P. E., & Montera, V. L. (2009). School reform: The flat worm in a flat world:
From entropy to renewal through indigenous invention. Teachers College Record,
111(5), 1328-1351.
Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership:
tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world (pp. 3-40).
Harvard Business Press.
Herr, K., & Anderson, G. L. (2015). The action research dissertation (2
nd
ed.). Sage
Publications.
Hoban, G., & Hastings, G. (2006). Developing different forms of student feedback to
promote teacher reflection: A 10-year collaboration. Teaching and Teacher
Education, 22(8), 1006–1019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2006.04.006
Johnson, B., & Christensen, L. B. (2014). Educational research: quantitative, qualitative,
and mixed approaches (5th ed.). Sage Publications.
117

Knaus, C. B., & Rogers-Ard, R. (2012) Educational Genocide: Examining the Impact of
National Education Policy on African American Communities. The Bridge:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy, (2)1.
https://digitalscholarship.tsu.edu/thebridge/vol2/iss1/1
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American
Educational Journal, 32(3), 465-491
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt:
Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–
12. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x035007003
Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. The remix. Harvard
Educational Review, 84(1), 74-135.
https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751
Larrivee, B. (2008). Development of a tool to assess teachers’ level of reflective practice.
Reflective Practice, 9(3), 341-360.
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). (2022). Magnet home. eChoices.
Retrieved March 31, 2022, from https://echoices.lausd.net/magnet#gsc.tab=0
Matsumura, L. C., Slater, S. C., & Crosson, A. (2008). Classroom climate, rigorous
instruction and curriculum, and students’ interactions in urban middle schools.
The Elementary School Journal, 108(4), 293-311.
Maxwell, J. A. (2015). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (3
rd
ed.).
Sage Publications.
Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and
implementation (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
118

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: a
methods sourcebook. SAGE.
Milner, H. R. (2010). Start where you are but don't stay there: understanding diversity,
opportunity gaps, and teaching in today's classrooms (pp. 13–44). Harvard
Education Press.
Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for
teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory
Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849209543534
Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R. (2002). Promoting academic literacy with
urban youth through engaging hip-hop culture. The English Journal, 91(6), 88.
https://doi.org/10.2307/821822
European colonization of North America. National Geographic Society. (n.d.). Retrieved
April 18, 2022, from https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/european-
colonization-north-america/?q=&page=1&per_page=25
Noddings, N. (1988). An ethic of caring and its implications for instructional
arrangements. American Journal of Education, 96(2), 215–230.
https://doi.org/10.1086/443894
Noguera, P., Darling-Hammond, L., & Friedlaender, D. (2015). Equal opportunity for
deeper learning. Deeper Learning Research Series. Jobs For the Future, (October).
Ormrod, J. E., Anderman, E. M., & Anderman, L. H. (2020). Educational psychology:
Developing learners. Pearson.
119

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally
sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational
Review, 84(1), 85–100. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.982l873k2ht16m77
Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (3
rd
ed.). Sage
Publications.
Rodgers, C.R. (2002). Seeing student learning: teacher change and the role of
reflection. Harvard Educational Review, 72(2), 230-252.
Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: the art of hearing data.
Sage Publications.
San Pedro Gifted Magnet. (2020).
https://sites.google.com/view/sanpedrogiftedmagnet/home?authuser=0.
San Pedro High School. (2020). https://sanpedrohs.org/.
San Pedro Senior High. California School Dashboard (CA Dept of Education). (2019).
https://www.caschooldashboard.org/reports/19647331937838/2019/academic-
performance.
Santamaría, L. J. (2009). Culturally responsive differentiated instruction: narrowing gaps
between best pedagogical practices benefiting all learners. Teachers College
Record, 111(1), 214-247.
Schön, D. A. (1991). From technical rationality to reflection-in-action. In The reflective
practitioner: How professionals think in action (pp. 49–69). essay, Avebury.
Spring, J. H. (2016). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality a brief history of the
education of dominated cultures in the United States. Routledge.
120

Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: redefinition of teaching
and schooling. Cambridge University Press.
Torpey, E. (2018). Measuring the value of education. Career Outlook, U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
Valenzuela, A. (1999). Chapter 3: teacher-student relations and the politics of
caring. Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring (pp.
61-111). State University of New York Press.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This action research self-study examines the way I used a counter hegemonic lens to develop my students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. This study took place over the course of the Fall 2020 semester and Spring 2021 semester at San Pedro Gifted Magnet Steam school where I am a high school English teacher. My research question, in conjunction with the components of my conceptual framework, were used to conduct in and out of the field analysis in three cycles. At the conclusion of the study, students demonstrated a growth in their ability to apply a counter hegemonic lens to build their sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence, and I demonstrated a growth in my ability to use assistant questions to deepen students’ sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence. The actions taken in this study were all aimed toward equipping students to disrupt and dismantle hegemony and structural racism in their lives and local settings.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Challenging dominant ideologies through sociopolitical discourse: an action research study on creating change as a history teacher

PDF

Examining the learning environments of urban high school educators who are culturally aware and serve a majority of students from historically marginalized populations

PDF

Incorporation of culturally relevant pedagogy to improve my practice and address the opportunity gap

PDF

Supporting world language teachers to develop a culturally sustaining curriculum and reflect on its enactment

PDF

Using culturally relevant pedagogy to deepen students' socio-political consciousness: an action research project

PDF

Engaging school leaders to conceptualize culturally relevant pedagogy

PDF

Cultivating critical reflection: an action research study on teaching and supporting district intern participants through critical reflection

PDF

Developing cultural competence in relation to multilingual learners

PDF

Uncovering dominant ideology: an action research project aimed to uncover dominant ideology to enact culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom

PDF

Teacher practices and student connection: high school students' perceptions of the influences of teacher pedagogy and care on their sense of connection

PDF

Developing a critical consciousness toward culturally responsive teaching through critical reflection: A professional development curriculum for elementary teachers

PDF

The relationship between culturally responsive self-efficacy and attitudes of trauma-informed practices among K-12 educators

PDF

Transformative learning: action research disrupting the status quo in literature in classrooms

PDF

A culture of care in elementary schools to impact Black student academic achievement: a case study

PDF

Applying culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom: a course for secondary, public, urban school educators

PDF

The importance of teacher motivation in professional development: implementing culturally relevant pedagogy

PDF

Changing the story: an action research study on utilizing culturally relevant pedagogical practice to enact a movement toward liberatory curriculum and instruction

PDF

The opportunity gap: culturally relevant pedagogy in high school English classes

PDF

Examining teacher pre-service/credential programs and school site professional development and implementation of culturally relevant teaching of BIPOC students

PDF

Black@: using student voices to dismantle colorblindness and inspire culturally relevant pedagogy in southern independent schools

Asset Metadata

Creator Bollers, Shareesa Ann (author)

Core Title Developing sociopolitical consciousness and cultural competence to dismantle structural racism and hegemony within my high school English classroom

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Educational Leadership

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 05/02/2022

Defense Date 04/06/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag action research,aesthetic care,andragogy,assistant questions,authentic care,brave space,California,Care,classroom climate,counter hegemonic,counter hegemonic lens,critical discourse,critical reflection,cultural competence,culturally relevant curriculum,culturally relevant pedagogy,disequilibrium,education genocide,educational genocide,funds of knowledge,hegemony,highschool english,historically marginalized,historically marginalized students,Indigenous literature,liberatory,liberatory teacher leadership,los angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,opportunity gap,Oppression,pedagogy,Racism,reflection,rigor,safe and brave space,safe space,San Pedro,sociopolitical,sociopolitical consciousness,structural racism,student growth,teacher leadership,zone of proximal development,ZPD

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Slayton, Julie (committee chair), Green, Alan (committee member), Samkian, Artineh (committee member)

Creator Email bollers@usc.edu,shareesabollers@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111208085

Unique identifier UC111208085

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Bollers, Shareesa Ann

Type texts

Source 20220503-usctheses-batch-937 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu