What is Freedom Mapping?
A thematic integrated approach to Ethnic Studies using the fields of math, health, writing, history-social sciences, and Ethnic Studies.
Freedom Mapping is an Ethnic Studies curriculum for students to engage with and envision the future of their communities. It can be taught as a year-long course or taught in individual units.
Ethnic Studies Educators across the state of California collaborated with various members of the California Subject Matter Projects (CSMP) to co-construct and plan this interdisciplinary curriculum. This project includes contributions from Math, Writing, History, Physical Education, and Health educators, and the curriculum developed was piloted in classrooms starting in the Fall of 2023.
Purpose
Freedom Mapping is a way to use local data, community cultural wealth, and freedom mapping to build the capacity in young people to envision a better world.
Through the use of data tools such ArcGis and CODAP and the analysis of health data, students explore dominant narratives of their community.
Students use oral histories, and critical analysis of art in their community to develop an elevated understanding of community cultural wealth, counternarratives, and community agency.
With a deeper, more well rounded perspective of their communities, students then explore counter maps of their neighborhoods.
Ultimately, students apply their new knowledge and analysis of data to create a Freedom Map that looks to the future of the communities they live in.
Theory
Community Cultural Wealth
Freedom Mapping is informed by Tara Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth model. The Community Cultural Wealth Model represents a framework to understand how students of color access and experience college (Or any K-16 educational space) from a strengths-based perspective.
Tara Yosso’s six-part Cultural Wealth Model includes six types of capital that educational leaders may use to frame their interactions with students. This may be particularly useful to educators committed to increase the number of students who remain in the academic pipeline.
The six forms of cultural capital are:
In Freedom Mapping, students consider how these forms of cultural capital manifest in their lives, their cultures, and their communities.
Source: Yosso, T.J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), pp. 69–91.
Freedom Mapping & The California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum
Freedom Mapping was funded by the California Subject Matter Project as part of an initiative to provide resources, professional learning, and innovative ideas for California’s Ethnic Studies educators. The project aligns with the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum by grounding its approach in the curriculum’s guiding principles and by addressing its core teaching outcomes. Freedom Mapping emphasizes critical inquiry, community engagement, and the analysis of local histories and issues, empowering students to examine their surroundings through a lens of social justice and equity. Through this alignment, the project serves as a valuable tool for educators seeking to implement Ethnic Studies in meaningful and transformative ways.
Freedom Mapping and the Guiding Values & Principles of Ethnic Studies
Freedom Mapping and the Eight Teaching Outcomes for Ethnic Studies
1. Pursuit of Justice & Equity
Ethnic studies did not arise in a vacuum. It arose with the intent of giving voice to stories long silenced, including stories of injustice, marginalization, and discrimination, as well as stories of those who became part of our nation in different ways, such as through slavery, conquest, colonization, and immigration. Ethnic studies should address those experiences, including systemic racism, with both honesty and nuance, drawing upon multiple perspectives. Ethnic studies should also examine individual and collective efforts to challenge and overcome inequality and discriminatory treatment.
2. Working Towards Greater Inclusivity
The ethnic studies movement arose because of historical exclusion and pursued greater inclusion. California ethnic studies should emphasize educational equity by being inclusive of all students, regardless of their backgrounds. This means incorporating the experiences and contributions of a broad range of ethnic groups, while particularly clarifying the role of race and ethnicity in the history of California and the United States. Yet, due to curricular time constraints, difficult choices will have to be made at the district and classroom level. While ethnic studies should address ethnicity in the broadest sense, it should devote special emphasis to the foundational disciplines while making connections to the varying experiences of all students.
3. Furthering Self-understanding
Through ethnic studies, students will gain a deeper understanding of their own identities, ancestral roots, and knowledge of self. Ethnic studies will help students better exercise their agency and become stronger self-advocates as well as allies and advocates for the rights and welfare of others.
4. Developing a Better Understanding of Others
The essential and complementary flip-side of self-understanding is the understanding of others. Ethnic studies should not only help students explore their own backgrounds. It should also help build bridges of intergroup understanding.
5. Recognizing Intersectionality
Ethnic studies focuses on the role of race and ethnicity. However, these are not the sole forces affecting personal identity, group identification, and the course of human experience. People, including students, are not only members of racial and ethnic groups. They also belong to many other types of social groups. These groups may be based on such factors as sex, religion, class, ability/disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, socioeconomic status, and language use.
6. Promoting Self-Empowerment for Civic Engagement
Ethnic studies should help students become more engaged locally and develop into effective civic participants and stronger social justice advocates, better able to contribute to constructive social change. It can also help students make relevant connections between current resistance movements and those in the past, and to imagine new possibilities for a more just society.
7. Supporting a Community Focus
Ethnic studies in all California districts should address the basic contours of national and statewide ethnic experiences. This includes major events and phenomena that have shaped our diverse ethnic trajectories. However, individual school districts may also choose to enrich their approach to ethnic studies by also devoting special attention to ethnic groups that have been significantly present in their own communities.
8. Developing Interpersonal Communication
Ethnic studies in all California districts should address the basic contours of national Achieving the preceding principles will require onl … additional capability: effective communication. Particularly considering California’s extensive diversity, ethnic studies should help build effective communication across ethnic differences. This includes the ability to meet, discuss, and analyze sometimes controversial topics and issues that garner multiple diverse points of view. In other words, students should learn to participate in difficult dialogues.
Freedom Mapping includes units of instruction designed using the Inquiry Design Model (IDM)
The IDM was designed by C3 Teachers. This approach to unit instruction prioritizes inquiry, evidence, and civic engagement. According to C3 Teachers, The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) is a distinctive approach to creating curriculum and instructional materials that honors teachers’ knowledge and expertise, avoids overprescription, and focuses on the main elements of the instructional design process as envisioned in the Inquiry Arc of the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for State Social Studies Standards (2013). The Freedom Mapping of the IDM builds on this approach by incorporating elements of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy, praxis, and alignment to the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.
Counter Mapping
Governments, military, businesses etc. have all mapped places/people/etc. for their own purposes. Counter-mapping is the direct response by communities who might have been excluded from the map/know there is more to a place/space than what other maps have implied. (Source)
“Counter-maps” is a term for cartography that reveals the realities and knowledge of marginalized groups in society.
Examples of Counter Maps
Votes for Women poster from 1917
Atlanta Rap Map Veazey Studio
In Freedom Mapping, students engage in counter mapping when they reimagine and redesign parts of their community. They identify and locate centers of community cultural wealth, art and knowledge holders.
Our Organizations
CSMP
Bay Area
Writing Project
California Physical Education-Health Project
