Students nationwide to learn of Kern’s history through local teacher residency program

Kern County’s role in American history will be passed onto students nationwide through a new residency program teaching local and out-of-state educators about the César E. Chávez National Monument, farmworker history and how the “Bakersfield Sound” united migrants to this region.

Cal State Bakersfield Professor Adam Sawyer and Bakersfield College Associate Professor Adam Rosales won a National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks grant, which offers K-12 teachers a chance to learn about how the Central Valley’s farmworkers united despite divisions along racial and urban-rural lines.

Greater representation in education — through teaching this farmworker history — increases civic participation and strengthens democracies, according to Rosales, who’s also a project co-director for the residency program titled “California Dreamin’: Migration, Work and Settlement in the ‘Other’ California.”

“It’s a chance to integrate the history of our community, our local community, our local county into the classroom for our students,” said Rosales.

The educational journey starts in Allensworth in Tulare County, the first town run by Black people, to study African-Americans’ rural to rural movement when typically scholars examine their transition from the rural south to urban north, according to the professor’s grant application.

Teachers will visit the Sunset Labor Camp in Arvin where Okies resided and sites in Delano demonstrating how Filipino workers gained their voice in the labor movement. A windy drive to Keene to see La Nuestra Señora de la Paz, or the Cesar Chavez National Monument, will allow educators to learn about strategies to strengthen the farmworker movement such as ethnic coalition building, the grant application added.

“These four locales are also representative of the truly multiracial and multiethnic mosaic of farmworker history — and the immense contributions of farmworkers — in the San Joaquín Valley,” Sawyer, the CSUB associate professor of teacher education, director of the liberal

studies program and the bilingual authorization, wrote in an email. “At a time in which the mass media and body politic often reduces the rural U.S. to a white monolith, this diversity and inclusiveness is particularly important to convey.”

This residency program allows teachers to develop their skills by introducing them to guest speakers, CSUB’s special collections, films, readings and music. Robert Price, who’s written extensively about the Bakersfield Sound, will also speak about music and its national significance.

Music offered a common ground for African-American, Okies, Filipinos and Mexicans working as farmworkers in Kern County, Rosales said.

This story isn’t taught to area residents. A vast majority of college students in Delano didn’t learn about the farmworker movement in their K-12 education despite living in the epicenter of a “globally important movement for human dignity,” Sawyer wrote, while adding he and Rosales published these findings.

“It is important for diverse Americans to see themselves and the places they inhabit in the school curriculum, not just to grapple with what has already happened, but perhaps most importantly, also contemplate what has yet, and CAN take place in the future,” he added.

Immersing educators into places where history unfolded allows them to see options available to those fighting for their rights decades ago, Sawyer wrote. They learn the material better, which enhances their lessons to students and their professional development, Rosales added.

In a country where the role of monuments has divided many, teachers will examine the role of monuments in the farmworker and migration movement when they didn’t inhabit one place for lengthy time periods, Rosales noted.

Local history should be preserved and respected — especially for students raised in this region, he noted.

“We only think of negatives about Bakersfield,” Rosales said. “... This is something that young people can be proud of because it’s in their backyard, it’s their cultural heritage.”