Social Justice & Community
Learning from Dolores Huerta’s legacy
New K-12 lesson plans support comprehensive history understanding by bringing Huerta’s life story into California classrooms
Tom Hilton, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
UC Santa Cruz’s Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas recently partnered with the Dolores Huerta Foundation and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center to release instructor’s guides and educational lesson plans for elementary, middle school, and high school students that draw from the life and legacy of social justice icon Dolores Huerta.
Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez in 1962 and helped to bring about historic labor organizing victories across the country, rallying supporters with her famous mantra of “Sí, se puede.” Today she is the founder and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She has spent more than 60 years leading community organizing and lobbying efforts to address issues like labor rights, gender discrimination, voter registration, education reform, LGBTQ rights, and economic inequality on behalf of farm workers, immigrants, women, youth, and others.
The new educational resources based on Huerta’s life that were created for kindergarten through middle school classrooms are broken out by grade level and aligned to California State Standards. They focus on reading, writing, vocabulary, and critical thinking skills, in addition to civics and history. And the resources for high school classrooms are aligned to both California State Standards and the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, encouraging students to explore the history of the Delano Grape Strike and themes like civic engagement, civil rights, and labor organizing rights.
“My mother, Dolores Huerta, and others like her, have been left out of history books for far too long,” said Camila Chavez, Executive Director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. “We hope that teachers and students alike find these lesson plans inspiring and useful in learning from our history and carrying its lessons forward.”
Faculty and staff from the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz worked on lesson plans and instructor guides for the project. The center was named in Huerta’s honor in 2022 and often works closely with the Dolores Huerta Foundation to advance shared goals. The center’s work combines perspectives from the fields of Latinx ethnic studies and Latin American area studies to focus on the experiences of Latinx people in the United States and the social, political, economic, and environmental forces shaping Latin America.
UC Santa Cruz Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies Sylvanna Falcón, former faculty director of the center, initiated and oversaw the project, which was rooted in the Huerta Center’s ongoing collaborations with the Dolores Huerta Foundation. The center’s research program and operations manager, Kim Vachon, who has a doctorate in education from UC Santa Cruz, revised K-8 lesson plans, created instructor guides and designed high school lesson plans in partnership with Huerta and her family.
“It was an honor to collaborate with Dolores Huerta and her family to shape these lesson plans into something that can carry on her legacy of fighting for civil rights over the last 80-plus years,” said Vachon. “At 95 years old, Dolores Huerta sends an inspirational message to us all that we should never give up the fight for civil rights. While threats to ethnic studies loom all around us, it is more important than ever for us to continue Huerta’s life’s work of community organizing and civic engagement and pass it on to the next generation.”
The curriculum development project was funded by the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, a research initiative spearheaded by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. The lesson plans provide teachers with a resource to celebrate Dolores Huerta Day, an official state day of recognition on April 10, and will be featured in a workshop at the California Council for the Social Studies conference in March, leading up to Dolores Huerta Day.
Dolores Huerta herself hopes the day of recognition and educational efforts around it can help inspire civic engagement among the next generation.
“I want students to get a sense of their own empowerment and the things that they can do to make the world a better place,” she said.