The Chicana/o Studies department will host an interactive professional development workshop on Friday, Feb. 23 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. aimed to support faculty in serving Latinx students.
The event titled “The Status of San Diego’s Chicanx/Latinx Students in Higher Education: Decolonizing Local Colleges and Universities” will be held in room MS-123, according to a flyer sent to staff via email.
The event comes in anticipation of scholar Gina A. Garcia’s arrival who will be giving a presentation on March 6 to further elaborate on her concept of “servingness.”
According to event organizer Norell Martinez, the workshop will include other presentations and group activity work.
“It’s part of a larger vision that we want as a department to put on more professional development events that discuss and help faculty think through what it means to serve Chicanx/Latinx students,” said Martinez, who is a Chicana/o Studies professor at City.
According to the City College website, 48% of students at City College are Latinx.
San Diego City College is a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, an institution of higher education that has a 25% full-time Hispanic student enrollment.
“We are going to have discussions about what it means to be an HSI, sort of taking this idea of ‘servingness’ that Garcia talks about in her book,” Martinez said.
According to the flyer, the first 25 people to register will receive a free copy of Garcia’s book.
The presenters include representatives from The San Diego Chicano/Latino Concilio on Higher Education, an organization of educators who conduct research and publish reports to advocate for Chicanx students and programs in higher education.
They will be joined by two members of the Association of Raza Educators who will be sharing their experiences working with high school students to shed light on the challenges that younger students face.
“Both organizations, the Concilio and A.R.E, look and think about access to education not just as a way for social mobility and as a right for people to access, but also (that) the role of educators is to elevate consciousness,” Martinez said.
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (M.E.Ch.A) students will also be joining to share their experiences as Chicanx students in higher education.
“Of course we want our students to finish their transfer …, but we also don’t want to teach them to step all over everybody to get there,” Martinez said. “We want to teach them about community, the importance of justice and not to be oppressors.”
