What the strands are
Minnesota's ethnic studies mandate (section 120B.251) organizes the field into three anchor standards: Identity, Resistance, and Ways of Knowing. These are not arbitrary categories — they reflect how ethnic studies scholars have organized the discipline for decades.
Every lesson and resource in this course is tagged to one or more of these strands. When you plan a unit, knowing which strand you are activating helps you make deliberate choices about what thinking you are asking students to do.
Standard codes in this course
The three strands correspond to Minnesota standards 23 (Identity), 24 (Resistance), and 25 (Ways of Knowing / Methodologies). You will see these codes on every lesson — e.g., 6.5.23.1 or 7.5.24.2 — to make documentation straightforward.
Identity
The Identity strand asks students to analyze how race, ethnicity, religion, geography, and gender are constructed — and by whom. This is not a self-esteem exercise. It is a structured examination of how identities are made, contested, and used as tools of power.
“Analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity and gender.”
In practice, Identity lessons ask: Who gets to name a community? Who decides what counts as “American”? Why are some histories taught and others erased? Students examine those questions through art, primary sources, and their own experience.
Why it matters
When students see their communities named and analyzed with rigor, the cognitive burden of invisibility lifts — and deeper engagement becomes possible. Identity content is not supplementary. It is foundational to academic engagement.
Resistance
Communities of color have never been passive. The Resistance strand documents how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic exercises of power — locally and globally. Students study not just that people resisted, but how, and what worked.
This means examining specific strategies, organizations, and moments of change. The Dakota and Ojibwe sovereignty movements. The Rondo neighborhood's fight against I-94. Somali community organizing in Minnesota. The civil rights movement as strategy, not just inspiration.
Why it matters
A curriculum that only shows communities as victims of oppression — without showing their resistance — is still a distorted curriculum. The Resistance strand corrects that by centering agency and strategy alongside historical harm.
Ways of Knowing
Whose knowledge counts as knowledge? The Ways of Knowing strand asks students to take seriously forms of knowledge that standard curriculum has treated as peripheral: oral histories, Indigenous epistemologies, community memory, artistic testimony.
A Gordon Parks photograph is a primary source. An elder's account of Rondo is historical evidence. A student's own family story is a legitimate object of academic inquiry. This strand teaches students to use ethnic and Indigenous studies methods to understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression — and what could dismantle them.
Watch for this
“Ways of Knowing” is the strand most at risk of being treated as “cultural add-ons.” It is not. It is an epistemological challenge — asking students to question which sources count as authoritative and why.
A note on overlap
These strands are interconnected, not separate. A lesson about the Somali diaspora in Minnesota might address Identity (Who am I in this new place?), Resistance (How did this community build institutions under pressure?), and Ways of Knowing (What does a Somali elder's account reveal that a textbook cannot?). Tag overlaps are expected and encouraged.
When you plan a lesson, it is worth asking: which strand is the primary driver today? That helps you name the intellectual work clearly for students — and for yourself.