"Affirming Youth of Color in Educational and Community Spaces Through Skate Pedagogy"
The Dr. Porter Lee Troutman, Jr. Center for Multicultural Education and UNLV College of Education invite you to join us for a two-day event Feb. 28-29, 2024.
Day 1: You’re Skating on Native Land!
Activities begin at 4 p.m. on Feb. 28 in the UNLV Student Union Ballroom B&C with informal skateboard blank deck design and zine creation activities. The formal program begins at 4:30 p.m. with context setting and screening of the short film, Walls Cannot Keep Us from Flying.
The event continues with a panel discussion featuring:
- Douglas Miles, Sr., the founder of Apache Skateboards, and members of the Apache Skate Team
- Noah Romero, assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Hampshire College
- Richie Savage, a local skate brand artist
- Lauren Meza aka Bash, a local skater affiliated with Death Drop Roller Skate Board Shop
As part of the panel, the short film, Mystery of Now will be shown and discussed. During the event, local community partners from Fifth Sun Project and Mojada, Inc., will share information about their community-embedded work and services; additionally, there will be skateboarding related T-shirt and professionally designed skateboard deck raffles and food!
About the Presentations
- Walls Cannot Keep Us from Flying is dedicated to youth skate culture, illustrating the importance of solidarity and liberation through skateboarding.
- In designing skateboard blank decks attendees are liberated to explore their own creativity; in collaborating with CoZi Las Vegas and UNLV’s A4 Zine Club to create skate-focused zines, attendees build solidarity.
- The panel discussion provides opportunity to explore Apache youth and other Youth of Color skate culture through engagement with critical questions like: What draws Indigenous, Asian-Indigenous, and other Youth of Color to skate culture? What do young people learn from skateboarding that they do not learn in school? What can educators and policy makers learn from youth skaters to improve student affirmation and engagement in education?
- Mystery of Now discusses the creation of Apache Skateboards to increase Apache youth access goods and services, and create new ways of protecting Apache culture from ongoing efforts to eradicate Indigenous lifeways through dispossession and miseducation.
- Fifth Sun Project, a local Woman of Color-led community-embedded, grassroots cultural collective will share information about their work raising funding to provide mutual aid and build solidarity in working for Indigenous justice and global liberation.
- Mojada, Inc., will share how, through local community, they are working to reshape the landscape of organizing and direct action through a mix of events, workshops, art, collaborations and civic initiatives, and to redefine outreach with grassroots organizing, mutual aid networks, and accessible Political 101s.
What is skate pedagogy?
While the benefits of skating have long been known to skaters, from an educator, even a critically conscious educator lens, skating as a form of pedagogy is new in addressing the unfortunately durably hard problems of transforming education and educational spaces (and what counts as both) to meaningfully re/engage young people in learning and teaching, including by inspiring Youth of Color to become transformative educators.
