College of Education Creates Texas’s First Tejano History Curriculum March 27, 2012

Tejanos have been a part of Texas for more than 500 years and make up over 50 percent of Texas’s youth population. Until this year, though, their history was absent from Texas classrooms.

Thanks to faculty, students and alumni of The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education, as well as the support of several education, corporate and non-profit partners, that’s changing.

“Nobody ever knew there were famous Tejanos and that Tejanos were doing as many good things as everyone else,” said fourth grader Ariana Estrada. “We have important people in our history, too, and I’m one of the first kids to ever learn about them at school. Kids like me didn’t know we had all of these things to be proud of!”

Estrada attends Brentwood Elementary in Austin and is in one of six Austin ISD fourth grade classes participating in the Tejano History Curriculum Project with The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education.

With a $100,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation, and as part of the Tejano Monument Project, University of Texas at Austin education professors Maria Franquiz and Cinthia Salinas are developing bilingual curricular materials for Texas fourth grade teachers to use and supplement Texas history lessons.

Current and former bilingual elementary school teachers in the College of Education’s Proyecto Maestria master’s degree program also are collaborators in creation of the curriculum and are piloting it in their classes.

Proyecto Maestria is a grant-funded program that brought Austin ISD and the College of Education together to work on increasing the quality and quantity of highly skilled bilingual and English as a Second Language teachers in Austin.

Franquiz, Salinas, and the bilingual generalist undergraduate students in the College of Education have worked closely with historians, including University of Texas at Austin history professor Emilio Zamora and Austin Community College history professor Andres Tijerina, on the scope and contents of the curriculum.

“One reason we were able to secure support for the curriculum project is because of the interest and enthusiasm in Tejano history that’s been generated by the Tejano Monument Project,” said Franquiz, Maxine Foreman Zarrow Endowed Faculty Fellow in Education and Assistant Dean for Faculty Development in the College of Education.

“For the past decade, many Tejano leaders and groups have been working very hard to gain approval for a Tejano monument at the Capitol, and this, fortunately, has led to a surge of interest in Tejanos’ heritage in general. Texas has the second largest Hispanic population in the nation, and it’s so important that our students – all of our students – have a chance to learn about where they came from and feel pride when they think about who they are. Everyone, not just Tejanos, will benefit from learning more about the challenges that early immigrant groups settling in Texas and their descendants have faced and the major contributions they’ve made.”

In addition to learning about Tejano history, fourth graders in the six participating classes are applying their knowledge and completing projects that they will bring to the monument unveiling.

Noreen Rodriguez’s class at Brentwood Elementary chose to create Tejano Story Boxes as their project. The students have transformed cereal boxes into biographical story boxes that describe the accomplishments of prominent Tejano musicians, writers, politicians, teachers and activists.

“I researched Gregorio Esparza,” said Brentwood fourth grader Ellean Ramirez. “He was the only Tejano who fought on the Texas side at the Alamo. I don’t think Tejanos know a whole lot about the Alamo and they definitely don’t know about Gregorio.

“Gregorio’s son Enrique was so proud of his dad that he wrote a book about him and the battle at the Alamo and talked about how his dad contributed a lot to Texas history. I even read that book. You would not believe how much I know about Gregorio Esparza right now – he’s amazing.”

Other classes selected different projects. Brenda Ayala Lewis’s students at Dawson Elementary class assembled tri-fold illustrated packets that contain information about Texas immigrants, focusing specifically on the immigrant experience of Tejanos.

At Galindo Elementary and Wooten Elementary the students are making a quilt whose squares tell the story of the Tejano experience and learning about Tejano contributions to music.

As another major contribution to Tejano curriculum, undergraduate bilingual education students in Salinas’s methods course are creating journey boxes that are filled with primary sources related to a specific Tejano history topic. They will share these with the six fourth grade classes in April and will be able to use them later in their own classes when they become teachers.

“Each student selected a topic related to Tejano history, like vaqueros or a particular battle between Texas and Mexico, and did extensive research on the topic,” said Salinas. “They gathered primary source materials like journal entries, letters, photos, maps, drawing, birth records and postcards and, together, all of these items offer a firsthand mini-lesson about a subject. They’re working on under-documented, under-represented individuals and events, so these boxes contain some important discoveries.”

According to Salinas, when used in a fourth grade class, for example, journey boxes are an exceptionally effective way to intellectually challenge students and build critical thinking skills.

“It’s amazing how adept the students are at doing research and finding obscure primary materials and how excited they become,” said Salinas. “It’s a very motivating activity that gives students personal choice and lets them become actively involved in learning. According to a substantial body of research, learning is enhanced when students are given choices and are allowed to become physically engaged in the learning process.”

The curriculum is going to be presented at education conferences, in teacher professional development classes and can be used by a variety of culture and arts organizations that are interested in enriching their own Tejano history education efforts. The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin already has expressed a desire to obtain instructional resources. The curriculum also will be available online.

“While I’ve been doing research on Pat Mora, a Tejano poet and children’s book writer who’s still alive today, I’ve been learning that Tejanos have so many reasons to be proud!” said Theylin Colindrez, a student in Rodriguez’s class at Brentwood Elementary.

—Kay Randall, University Communications, 512-232-3910