Indigenous Epistemology & the Four Tezcatlipocas

By Alexandro “Salo” Escamilla

We are pleased to share with you today a piece from our storytelling series of reflections and noticings coming out of our convening in Tucson!

Please stay tuned for more writings from our team of storytellers and revisit the blog here to see them all in the coming months.

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The ALP Conference concluded on February 17. 2023, and now the stories start coming in. A team of twenty-seven—including eight educators from Tucson—were a storytelling team in Tucson. For the next few months, this blog will share the stories of those folks.

CRPI Staff and ALP participants engaging in a dynamic discussion about African American and Mexican American courses and curriculum units (left). Mural depicting the Four Tezcatlipocas painted by Wakefield Students and teachers in 2006 (middle). Chucho Vai Sevoi, delivering the welcoming address at ALP Conference (right).

My experience at the ALP Conference made its way full circle on our trip to Wakefield Middle School, located in Barrio Chicano, near the City of South Tucson. Our discussion there made me reflect on the powerful and profound keynote address from Chucho Vai Sevoi, a chantlaca who goes back to when we were both youth and involved in el movimiento (the movement).

His message about the worth of indigenous epistemologies made me reflect on the Four Tezcatlipocas; Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe Totek. Thinking back to 1998, when Chucho, myself, and about 40 other Chicano Youth representing Tucson MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan) Central attended the MEChA National Conference hosted by the Phoenix College chapter.

The entire Tucson contingent attended a workshop facilitated by Xicano elder and founding member of Tonatiera, Tupak Enrique Acosta, where we were introduced to concepts known as the Four Tezcatlipocas. Tupak eloquently explained how the Tezcatlipocas offered an indigenous Chicana/o/x framework that could potentially be used as a foundation for stability and harmony in life and education for Raza youth.

At Wakefield the ALP participants engaged in a dialog about the components of Culturally Relevant and Responsive courses. Our dialog had me thinking about how Wakefield was my first teaching assignment in TUSD, and how the Xicano/Mexicana/Raza, Yaqui and Tohono O’odham students there, taught me so many lessons about what these concepts really mean and represent.

Most importantly, however, these students (who I refer to as los chamacos legendarios de Wakefield) taught me how to apply the Four Tezcatlipocas to curriculum, pedagogy, and instruction. Our daily practice was to recite the following dichos based on The In Lak’ech and The Four Tezcatlipocas that we learned from another chantlaca, Dr. Curtis Acosta and his students from Tucson High School.

*Chantlaca: Nahuatl for Homie/camarada/good friend

* Tonatierra is a community-based Indigenous rights non-profit organization based in downtown Phoenix, AZ. focused on advancing Indigenous Peoples self-determination, sustaining cultural and spiritual traditions.

*Dichos: Mexican sayings and/or quotes that instill lessons, values, and truths about life on Earth.

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About the Storyteller

Alexandro “Salo” Escamilla is a Chicana/o/x Studies and social justice educator of twenty-one years in Chukson (Tucson), Arizona and within the Tucson Unified School District. A key voice in the development of the Mexican American/Raza Studies Department, and the Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Instruction Department of the same district, as well as a social studies, history, government and literature teacher at the middle and high school levels; Salo has successfully developed curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy based on Chicanismo, carnalismo, and la cultura cura. These concepts led to unprecedented success in reading, writing, and math, essentially eliminating the opportunity gap in his Chicano Studies Classes. Following the attack and elimination of MARSD in 2012, he continued this work, piloting the culturally relevant history and government classes at Tucson High Magnet School. He currently serves as a curriculum and instruction specialist, for teachers implementing Culturally Relevant curriculum, and is a PhD student in the University of Arizona’s Teaching, Learning, and Social Culturally Studies Program.

La Cultura Cura: Cultivating Ethnic and Academic Identity

By Alexandro “Salo” Escamilla

We are pleased to share with you today a piece from our storytelling series of reflections and noticings coming out of our convening in Tucson!

Please stay tuned for more writings from our team of storytellers and revisit the blog here to see them all in the coming months.

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The ALP Conference concluded on February 17. 2023, and now the stories start coming in. A team of twenty-seven—including eight educators from Tucson—were a storytelling team in Tucson. For the next few months, this blog will share the stories of those folks.

Photos from Dr. José González American Government-Mexican American Viewpoint Class

One of the privileges of working for the Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Instruction Department is to visit my chantlaca, Dr. José González and his beautiful and scholarly students at Tucson High Magnet School, located in the heart of Chukson, AZ (aka Tucson or La Tusa, Ariza). This time with the company of new homies from ALP, representing communities across the United States.

Never a disappointment, these Culturally Relevant seniors demonstrated academic skill responding to and citing textual evidence from scholarly sources. Research indicates that the analytical skill demonstrated by the youth, in a setting such as Dr. González’ classroom, is a result of a cultura cura pedagogy, eliciting students to draw connections between their academic and ethnic identities.

Entering Dr. G’s CR classroom, a mescla (mixture) of cultura cura pedagogy combined with scholarly thought and dialog is evident. Like the maza at a family tamalada, Dr. G and his students work together to knead the concepts, ideas, and historical facts surrounding various topics, in the construction of their own tamal; based with their own research and unique perspectives. Students engaged with one another in dialog circles and as a whole class based on a reading from A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

One student said, “I would like to speak to paragraph 18…‘Congress passed a law very clearly abridging freedom of speech in America’, is not as equally just as we think it is. Comparing movements and protests, looking back on the January 6th attacks, I think these protests were violently and aggressively attacking…congress. Nothing was done quickly…the George Floyd/BLM protests, I feel any POC involved protest, always ends up violent when officers are involved, and I remember watching the news in 2020…arrests being made right away. You compare and contrast that to January 6th, arrests weren’t made until afterwards. I would argue it is not as equal as we think it is.”

Another said, “Paragraph 15 is basically talking about property and how…a few people had great amounts of property. Many had small amounts, and others had none. Jackson Maine found that one third of the population during the American Revolution were small farmers, while 3% of the population had large holdings and could be considered wealthy. We were just talking about how not many people owned property but the people that did had a lot of property and how it’s always been about being wealthy and about the economy and how it favors people who have more things basically.”

Following the class, a panel of five CR students engaged in a dialog with ALP participants. The following quotes represent introspection (a concept we refer to as Tezcatlipoca) about ethnic and academic identity development, a perfect way to end this story:

“I believe I am stronger in terms of academic identity, or even just having conversations about current events. I grew up in a private school and was one of the only Mexican American students. I was very far away from my culture. Even though I was doing good academically I didn’t feel like I could get to the same level of the other kids because I was one of the only [Mexican kids]. Being in this class really did teach me that I have a voice and that my academic identity has certainly gotten a lot more confident. I’ve been able to talk more in class…in terms of cultural identity, I really compared myself physically and in terms of my customs with the other kids. In this class I started to love my features…appreciate my culture and be more confident in who I am.”

- Female Identifying Chicana Student

“I have a strong academic identity…I get good grades and can get by. I always knew I had to be a certain way around teachers. I’ll just play the game and I’ll get an A. That’s how I always approached school just playing the game. There are topics in history I really get into because of video games but mostly I get into European history which is not really my culture. Everything I learned in AP World and European History didn’t help me at all for this class. I felt like I was really behind on certain topics, but I was able to relate to them. It helped me connect both worlds. So now I have a deeper sense of history, but of my culture…I didn’t expect that I was going to like it because I was like knights are so much cooler. I didn’t want to learn about these Aztecs I wanted to learn about knights. Dr. G helped me open my eyes to topics like the Mexican Revolution.”

- Male Identifying Chicano Student

*Chantlaca: Nahuatl for Homie/camarada/good friend

*La Cultura Cura: Culture cures is a concept from the Chicano Movement associating culture with medicine.

*Chukson: O’odham word meaning the Black Basin and original name for Tucson area.

*Tamalada: a family party where people get together to make tamales.

*Masa: dough used at a tamalada

*La Tusa, Ariza: Caló/Chuco word for Tucson, Arizona.

*Tezcatlipoca: Nahuatl concept meaning the smoking mirror, symbolic of memory and self-reflection.

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About the Storyteller

Alexandro “Salo” Escamilla is a Chicana/o/x Studies and social justice educator of twenty-one years in Chukson (Tucson), Arizona and within the Tucson Unified School District. A key voice in the development of the Mexican American/Raza Studies Department, and the Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Instruction Department of the same district, as well as a social studies, history, government and literature teacher at the middle and high school levels; Salo has successfully developed curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy based on Chicanismo, carnalismo, and la cultura cura. These concepts led to unprecedented success in reading, writing, and math, essentially eliminating the opportunity gap in his Chicano Studies Classes. Following the attack and elimination of MARSD in 2012, he continued this work, piloting the culturally relevant history and government classes at Tucson High Magnet School. He currently serves as a curriculum and instruction specialist, for teachers implementing Culturally Relevant curriculum, and is a PhD student in the University of Arizona’s Teaching, Learning, and Social Culturally Studies Program.

"Don't Just Talk About It. Be It.": 5 Lessons from an Excursion

By Adam Sparks

We are pleased to share with you today a piece from our storytelling series of reflections and noticings coming out of our convening in Tucson!

Please stay tuned for more writings from our team of storytellers and revisit the blog here to see them all in the coming months.

---

The ALP Conference concluded on February 17. 2023, and now the stories start coming in. A team of twenty-seven—including eight educators from Tucson—were a storytelling team in Tucson. For the next few months, this blog will share the stories of those folks.

From left to right: Dr. Rashad Bennett, Nza Branton, and Ron Garlington from Young Middle School in Atlanta Public Schools are greeted by Desert View Principal Angelica Duddleston

As we approached Desert View High school on Day 2 of the 2023 Assessment for Learning Conference in Tucson, the typical trappings were all there: Sports fields and courts in a row, school busses lined up, a mascot (Welcome Jaguars!) emblazoned welcome sign as you pull into the parking lot. Aside from the desert-like surroundings, it felt much like other high schools I’ve taught at over the past seven years.

What makes Desert View different slowly revealed itself over the course of the afternoon and an incredibly powerful professional development experience. Yesenia Ayala, Kasie Betten, and Larissa Peru, under the support of Desert View Principal Angelica Duddleston, co-created and hosted the Student Agency and Student Voice Learning Excursion with our team of roughly 25 educational leaders. But they were not alone: As we came to find out, our professional development session was to be not just informed by or about, but actually created and led by, students. This is the story of that experience in 5 quotes.

1. “Don’t Just Talk About It. Be About It.”

Our team was greeted by Principal Angelica Duddleston and escorted to our classroom upon arrival at Desert View. We walked in under a banner that read “Don’t Just Talk About It. Be About It.” Principal Duddleston was the walking embodiment of those words. Her radio crackled repeatedly as she escorted us in, emphasizing how much effort and commitment went into creating this learning experience: Principal Duddleston was busy. And yet, here she was, carving out time in the middle of a school day to create a space for her educators and students to share their expertise and experiences with us. That Principal Duddleston took the time out of her day to greet us and take part in our learning, all while running a high school of roughly 2,000 students, was an early indicator that our hosts embodied the values and experiences they would share with us.

2. “There is No Hierarchy in Learning” - Ms. Larissa Peru, Math Teacher, Desert View High School

Larissa Peru of Desert View High School and Yesenia Ayala of the WestEd Formative Assessment Team lead group introductions.

Principal Duddleston led us to the English classroom of Ms. Kasie Betten. As we munched on pastries from a local bakery and sipped coffee, we took turns introducing ourselves and getting to know the learning objectives and activities for the day. Yesenia Ayala of WestEd, along with Larissa Peru and Kasie Betten of Desert View, explained that the goal of our session was to understand how student agency contributes to the overall shift of how we rethink assessment for learning. In doing so, we would conceptualize instructional practices that support student agency, reflect on the impact of structures that support student agency, and identify actional items to take back to our respective home districts/sites/ and work. On the surface, that might sound like a traditional professional development session. Then the students took over.

3. “It shows their trust in us. Just as they teach us, we teach others…It’s almost like we’re mini-activists or something.” - Aiden, Desert View High School

Ms. Betten and Ms. Peru walked their talk on student agency when they turned it over to Diego and Kiara, two seniors at Desert View High School, to lead us through the first of three activities. In Terry’s Travels & Visible Learning, we broke into groups and were tasked with making a toy boat that would float in a tub of water while holding a plastic dinosaur. The twist was that, within each table group, only one group knew what the assessment criteria was (i.e. getting the boat to float, generating a creative name for our vessel, etc). The experience emphasized the importance of not just sharing the assessment criteria for the learning task with learners in advance, but co-creating those assessment tasks to empower students with the agency to shape their own educational experiences. It became a major point of emphasis throughout our day: In classrooms and schools that empower students with agency, students are co-creators of knowledge with their teacher.

4. “If you want things to be different, you have to do things differently.” - Ms. Kasie Betten, English Teacher, Desert View High School

Over the course of three interactive activities, our group built boats to learn about the importance of learning criteria, tossed bean bags to weigh the differences between behavior and agency, and revised a lesson plan to include more opportunities to build student agency. A panel reflection led by our student facilitators closed our time together in which it became even more evident how impactful formative assessment and learner agency had been in shaping the educational journeys of the 5 students leading our session. “This is my last year of high school, which is kind of scary,” shared Kiara, “but I’ve grown in agency and as a learner.” For Diego, it shifted what was important about school: “I used to be more focused on grades. Now it’s more about understanding.” In many ways, this was the intent of Ms. Betten & Ms. Peru. As Ms. Betten put it: “The more you shift away from compliance, the less satisficing you see. It’s less ‘I’m done’ and more about deepening understanding….so students should know about pedagogy. The more they know about our processes and pedagogy, the more a huge curtain is lifted that hides things from them in their education.”

5. “We wouldn't have been practicing what we’re preaching if we didn’t include kids in the creation of this.” - Yesenia Ayala, WestEd Formative Assessment Associate

The Student Agency and Student Voice learning excursion’s group learning artifact

The Student Agency and Student Voice learning excursion’s group learning artifact

Upon excursion's end, our group said goodbye to our hosts and headed back to the convention center to reflect on our learning. In that space, we reflected on how powerful it was to take part in professional development in which the form followed the function: Our Desert View leaders didn’t just lecture us on agency, they created interactive activities in which we got to experience what agency actually is and is not. There was no more powerful way to do that than to have students lead the learning experience themselves. Put another way: “Don’t just talk about it. Be About it.” The students and educators at Desert View High School most certainly are.

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About the Storyteller

Adam Sparks is former social studies and English teacher from Nebraska. He holds a master's degree in Learning Design and Technology from Stanford where his work focused on using peer feedback to improve formative assessment practices. He is a co-creator of Short Answer, a new K-12 formative assessment tool.