FMURF Project Overview:

Project Overview: 

Adelante Legacy Preservation Project, is a community-engaged research initiative dedicated to documenting and sustaining the historical and contemporary significance of Latine social movements in education, including freedom schools—educational spaces created to cultivate political consciousness, cultural pride, and community self-determination in response to systemic inequities. Drawing from case studies including Casa De La Raza and Oakland Emiliano Zapata Street Academy, the project examines how freedom schools emerged from struggles for liberation and how their pedagogical philosophies continue to inform community-engaged, culturally grounded education today.

At a moment when educational institutions face increasing political pressure to sanitize curricula, limit ethnic studies, and marginalize community-based knowledge, this research underscores the importance of preserving and activating histories of resistance in education. Engaging undergraduate researchers in this work is not incidental; it is a form of concientizacion that equips students to critically interrogate power, historical omission, and the role of education in sustaining or disrupting inequities. Through this process, undergraduates come to understand research itself as an act of intervention and solidarity.

By foregrounding undergraduate perspectives, this panel also illustrates how the research process itself becomes a form of radical learning, mirroring the collaborative and liberatory practices that defined freedom schools. We argue that involving undergraduates in this work not only enriches the historical record but also models principles of co-learning, community accountability, and critical consciousness essential for reimagining educational futures oriented toward liberation.