What LESMC is
The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) is a coalition of ethnic studies educators, scholars, and community members who developed a principled framework for what ethnic studies teaching should do — not just what content it should cover.
This course is built on the LESMC framework. That means every lesson design decision — which images to use, which questions to ask, how assessment works — traces back to the values and principles LESMC has developed from decades of community-centered ethnic studies practice.
The 7 Cs
LESMC organizes ethnic studies teaching around seven principles — the 7 Cs. These describe what ethnic studies courses, teaching, and learning should do:
Cultivate
Empathy, community actualization, cultural perpetuity, self-worth, self-determination, and the holistic well-being of all participants, especially Native peoples and people of color.
Celebrate
Honor Native peoples of the land and communities of color by providing space for their stories of struggle and resistance, along with their intellectual and cultural wealth.
Center
Place high value on pre-colonial, ancestral, Indigenous, diasporic, familial, and marginalized knowledge.
Critique
Empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.
Challenge
Imperialist and colonial hegemonic beliefs and practices on ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels.
Connect
Past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice on global and local levels to ensure a truer democracy.
Conceptualize
Imagine and build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promote collective narratives of transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.
The double helix
LESMC situates the 7 Cs within a foundational model it calls the double helix: two interwoven values that must develop together — holistic humanization and critical consciousness.
“Humanization includes the values of love, respect, hope, and solidarity, and is based on the celebration of community cultural wealth.”
Critical consciousness is the developed capacity to see, name, and analyze systems of power. It is not pessimism — it is the analytical skill to ask: Who benefits from this arrangement? Who is harmed? What could be different?
The helix image insists that both strands develop simultaneously. A classroom that only celebrates without critiquing is incomplete ethnic studies. A classroom that only critiques without building hope is exhausting and counterproductive. Both matter, always.
What this means in your classroom
When you look at a lesson in this course, you should be able to identify which of the 7 Cs it is activating. A lesson that only celebrates — shows students beautiful art by artists of color — without critiquing, challenging, or connecting is incomplete ethnic studies.
Watch for this
The most common gap is lessons that Celebrate and Cultivate but never Critique or Challenge. Students feel affirmed but don't develop analytical tools. Check your lesson plan: is there a moment where students are asked to analyze power? If not, build one in.
The 7 Cs as a lesson planning checklist
You don't need all 7 in every lesson — but across a unit, all 7 should appear. Use them as a planning checklist: which Cs are strong in this unit? Which are missing? Where could I add a moment of critique, or of hope?