2022 Puente Equity Framework

Since 1981, the Puente Project has led the state in providing equitable instruction, academic counseling, and mentoring to support students marginalized by the educational system. When founded, the Puente Project was designed to support the college completion of Mexican-American and Latinx students, and over the years, has expanded to successfully support all students towards their higher education goals. As the Puente Project has a legacy of educational practices grounded in empathy, feminist pedagogy (*1), community care, and professional development, and because educational communities are often at the forefront of progress, Puente is ready to meet this moment with an equity framework which articulates our commitments and guides our work.

As Puente practitioners, we recognize the continued systemic oppression caused by the educational system, and though our work is staked in this system, we commit to creating spaces for our students and ourselves to challenge the status quo. We acknowledge that we do not keep our students safe with assimilationist practices and that in order to uphold our legacy in student service, we must reflect and directly address these struggles as we work to embody practices for our collective liberation. With a critical awareness informed not only by research and experience, but also by the leadership of our students and the obstacles that impede their success, we have identified five key areas of our equity framework: racial and immigrant justice, linguistic justice, LGBTQIA+ justice, disability justice, and environmental justice.

Racial and Immigrant Justice

The Puente Project strives to be anti-racist and culturally sustaining as we serve the diverse communities of California and beyond. We maintain that Black Lives Matter and stand with Black and Indigenous students and educators. The Puente Project welcomes students of all races, ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities with the recognition that centering Black and Indigenous experiences makes liberation for all possible. We assert that everyone has a right to feel seen and that all educational professionals have a duty to provide this welcoming atmosphere. We stand with immigrants and refugees, recognizing our responsibility to safeguard the dignity and rights of our communities. Our priorities include advocacy, fostering cross-cultural communication, and storytelling in service of community care and resilience. In practice, this means prioritizing collectivism and interdependence, affirming the value of cultural ways of knowing and being, supporting connection with ancestral lineages of wisdom and healing, and advocating for rights to safety and services in our campus communities and beyond.

Linguistic Justice

As Puente practitioners, we acknowledge that practices which deny us our rights to our own language/es in writing are damaging, racist, and assimilationist practices that uphold whiteness (*2). We understand that rejection of one’s language is a rejection of one’s culture, and by extension a rejection of the individual. While education in Standard American Edited English (one of many Englishes) has value, we live and teach in a multi-ethnic nation, and cannot continue to privilege SAEE. Other Englishes, translanguaging, code-meshing, and dialects have a place in academia and the “real” world. For these reasons, we must engage in ongoing professional development that: puts respect on the different Englishes spoken by our students, familiarizes us with grammatical constructions that are a result of other languages, and acknowledges that we can never be fully qualified to assess constructions that have so many generational and regional variations. In practice, this means receiving student work with care and prioritizing students’ voices, stylistic choices, and intention in their writing. We must revise writing assessment and evaluation processes to be anti-racist. As we continue our own education of language varieties, our assessment practices should invite and honor the sonics of our students in scholarly writing, celebrate their effective and innovative language constructions, and guide them towards clarity of their message.

LGBTQIA+ Justice

As Puente practitioners, we acknowledge that anti-gay and anti-trans bias persist in academia, and that ongoing legal and social challenges to LGBTQIA+ rights necessitate our continued advocacy. Puente affirms the dignity and worth of LGBTQIA+ people, recognizes that LGBTQIA+ people have led the resistance against many forms of oppression, and honors LGBTQIA+ history as a part of our collective history. The Puente Project commits to uplifting people’s intersectional identities. In practice, this means the intentional inclusion of LGBTQIA+ voices in our curriculum, avoiding gender binary language, advocating for LGBTQIA+ students, and seeking continuous learning opportunities to affirm LGBTQIA+ people. We recognize that the LGBTQIA+ experience is widely varied. We must decouple misunderstandings that conflate gender identity (*3) and/or gender expression (*4) to sexuality. We maintain the right for our students and colleagues to provide (at their discretion and perceived level of safety) their names, pronouns, gender, and identity and our duty to respect and honor them regardless of institutional labels or records.

Disability Justice

The Puente Project recognizes the intersectional experiences of people with disabilities and strives to make accessibility the default, so that disabled members of our community can fully participate in all programming. We acknowledge that the traditional approach to disability services focuses unfairly on individualistic methods that rely on people to self-advocate and navigate bureaucratic processes. We assert that diversity should value differing abilities and neurodivergencies, and support the right to receive accommodations that are not solely tied to institutional processes. In practice, this means seeking disabled peoples’ voices on accessibility practices that enable their success, prioritizing accessible content and activities in our face-to-face and virtual spaces (*5), advocating for accessible campus services, connecting students with mental and physical health resources, and learning the context of disability justice on our campuses and in our regions. As we recognize the history of ableism in educational contexts, we work to develop better practices towards design justice (*6). We recognize that disability justice is an issue of holistic access that goes beyond the traditional framing of physical access.

Environmental Justice

The Puente Project recognizes that environmental justice is a key component of tackling systemic oppression and central to preserving our communities. We advocate for an environmentalism that acknowledges the disparities in health outcomes, toxic exposure, and environmental degradation for Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities. To achieve equity that promotes wholeness, reciprocity and stewardship, we must advocate for an end to environmental racism. Our first step is to engage in education from underrepresented voices on the local-to-global impacts of climate change. In practice, this means making organizational decisions guided by these principles, building classroom resources, engaging in community leadership, and fostering experiential learning opportunities.

Equity for Staff and Practitioners

The Puente Project, as an organization, affirms that a vision of equity can not be fully realized for anyone, unless it includes equity for everyone. To this end, the Puente Project commits to continue advocating for equity in funding and support at the local and statewide levels. The Puente Project recognizes that our dedicated statewide staff alongside our middle, high school, and community college practitioners, deserve support and justice and also face many forms of oppression. We recognize the value and necessity of rest, community care, self care, and healing. In practice, this means the Puente Project shall continue offering professional development, with focus on: supporting new and transitioning practitioners, nurturing the connection between our personal wellness and our professional identities, and putting the principles of equity outlined in this framework into action. The Puente Project will continue a practice of active listening in service of building transformative spaces for all.

As the Puente Project commits to these values, we understand they address only some of the roots of oppression we face in academia. As stated above, this equity framework represents our current educational and community priorities, providing guidance for the positionality of our future workshops, trainings, and professional service. It is the expectation of the Puente Project that instructors, counselors, and staff affiliated with our organization strive to these values. It is our hope to witness and actively facilitate this change at each institution we have the opportunity to influence.

Footnotes:

1. Feminist Pedagogy is a teaching philosophy that rejects traditionally hierarchical educational practices, and instead centers knowledge co-creation, community-building, diversity, empowerment, student voice, and opportunities for ongoing reflection. Educators who implement feminist pedagogy see classroom learning as a community endeavor, and serve primarily as facilitators or mentors for student learning.

2. https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness & https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/files/White_Supremacy_Culture.pdf

3. Gender Identity: the internal experience and naming of our own gender which may or may not conform to social constructions

4. Gender Expression: the external expression or performance of one's gender identity, which may or may not conform to socially defined behaviors and characteristics

5. Accessibility practices including, but not limited to: reframing our understanding of deadlines and time in the service of accessibility, captioning, and screen-readable documents and presentations.

6. https://designjustice.org/read-the-principles