historia
Welcome to Filiberto (pronounced: fe-lee-berto) Chávez’s site for History! In Chicago and Oakland, I have taught college, high school, and middle school students. These distinct experiences have led me to understand the power of critical pedagogy in teaching. Critical pedagogy is grounded in an educational vision of social justice and equity. This requires a crucial outlook on institutions of education as well as a re-thinking of schools to communities. In praxis, critical pedagogy creates a dialogue between students, families, teachers, and administrators. It de-centers the teacher as a source of knowledge and power, allowing the students to have a more active voice in their education.
A central part of critical pedagogy is culturally responsive teaching. Culturally responsive teaching understands how students’ lives are formed by their culture, language, religion, and values and how this shapes who they are. Thus, the critical part of culturally responsive teaching is finding out who students are and using real-world connections and applications. In practice, this means bridging the class content to the students’ lives and how it matters.
About Me
I grew up in Whittier, which is about eighteen miles south of Los Angeles. I have three siblings and my parents, so in total, there are six of us. Even though my parents had an elementary school education, they were able to provide enough for us to get by and a loving household. In material things, we had two things, which to this day I’m grateful for, food and housing.
I’m the first in my family to graduate from high school, Whittier High School, where "Back to the Future" was filmed. I went to UC Berkeley, without knowing where exactly it was located, and studied History and Latino Studies. I also have a Master’s degree in History from the University of Chicago.
In short, I like history and I love to teach.
Affiliations
The Affiliate Education Program has provided access to educational resources, such as the Hamilton Education program, and Teacher Seminars taught by all-star faculty across the country.
With a generous grant from the Gilder Lehrman Education Program, I was also able to borrow a Traveling Exhibition that was showcased at the History and ELA Exposition at Madison Park Academy.
Historia is Latin for history, which means learning through research or a narration of what is learned.
*The map above is the first printed map in English to show California as an island. It was drawn by Henry Briggs in 1625. The name California comes from a folktale from Garci Rodríguez de Moltavo's Las sergidas de esplendían (1496), where the author describes a fictional island named California ruled by Queen Calafia. When the Spanish learned of an island (actually a peninsula) off northwestern Mexico rumored to be ruled by women, they named it "California" after Moltavo's novel.
Continuing Education
Mapping Nature Across the Americas, Newberry Library, National Endowment for the Humanities. Selected from applicants across the country to participate in a seminar exploring maps and the environment using primary sources from the Newberry Library, 2021.
Teaching Civics: Identity, History, and Action, Facing History and Ourselves, Learn how to create an open, supportive, and reflective learning community that embodies equitable and democratic values and supports ethical decision-making, online 2020.
The Teaching Tolerance Curriculum: Anti-Bias Curriculum for K-12 Social Studies and Language Arts Instruction, Teaching Tolerance and the Museum of Tolerance, Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards, and a unique pedagogical approach that integrates identity, diversity, justice, and action into instructional planning and delivery, Los Angeles, 2020.
Teaching Civics through History, Gilder Lehrman, selected from applicants across Northern California to be part of this seminar in San Francisco, 2020.
Teacher Seminar, Gilder Lehrman, selected from educators across the country to be part of Professor Manisha Sinha’s seminar, “Slavery and Abolitionism” at Pace University in New York, N.Y., 2019.
AP Summer Institute, World History for New Teachers, San Gabriel, California, 2019.
Long Term English Language Learners (LTEL) program participant developed to assess, identify, and target the needs of this specific group of English Learners working with the English Language Learner and Multilingual Program Achievement (ELLMA) Program at Oakland Unified, 2019.
KQED Learn Pilot Teacher for a safe online learning site for student-driven inquiry and collaboration across classrooms, communities, and regions, 2018.
Educators of Color Inquiry Group is a small inquiry group that focuses on the specifics of the social science discipline and social context of schooling. This program was developed in collaboration with Berkeley Unified, UC Berkeley, and the Black Teacher Project, 2018.
The Untold Story of the Department of Justice Incarceration of People of Japanese Ancestry, sponsored by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, in cooperation with National Japanese American Historical Society, 2017.