By Dare Dukes and Saba Sebhatu with Nadia Feracho, Jasmin Mendoza, and Angel Galindo.
Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in “theorizing,” in making sense out of what was happening. I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently. This “lived” experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, became a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away. Fundamentally, I learned from this experience that theory could be a healing place.
—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1996
Educational Video Center’s youth-centered, trauma-informed, culturally responsive curriculum fosters critical literacy and related skills that are essential for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to see, fully understand, and resist the oppressive structures that are harming their communities. Educational Video Center (EVC) is revising and updating our award-winning curriculum to address the ever-evolving needs of BIPOC youth and shifting approaches to media literacy in our rapidly changing technological and political worlds. Right at the center of this upgrade is a workshop called The 4 I's of Oppression, a training that, in the past couple of decades, has become a widely used tool not only by EVC, but by social justice organizations across the country.
The 4 I’s workshop presents a framework that helps participants see how their everyday experiences of injustice can be understood—and ultimately resisted—inside the context of broader oppressive systems and the institutions perpetuating them.
What Are the 4 I's of Oppression?
The 4 I’s workshop guides participants through exploring four types of oppression: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. Our workshop defines these four types as follows:
Ideological
Any oppressive system has at its core the idea that one group is somehow better than another, and in some measure has the right to control the other group.
Institutional
The network of institutional structures, policies, and practices that create advantages and benefits for some, and discrimination, oppression, and disadvantages for others. (E.g., companies, governmental bodies, prisons, schools, organizations, families, and religious institutions.)
Interpersonal
Interactions between people where people use oppressive behavior, insults, or violence.
Internalized
The process by which a member of an oppressed group comes to accept and live out the inaccurate myths and stereotypes applied to the group by its oppressors.
The Workshop: Seeing Structural Oppression in the Day-to-Day
Through interactive, participant-centered exploration, the 4 I’s workshop gives learners an understanding of how oppression manifests in these four categories. Participants experience firsthand how to see and break down the mechanisms of power and privilege while reflecting on their positions within these structures. This fosters not only understanding, but also a sense of accountability, empathy, and solidarity. In this way, the workshop equips folks with the critical lens needed to recognize, challenge, and transform oppression in its many forms.
This learning trajectory—from understanding to action—can be seen in two key exercises at the center of the workshop, Concept Mapping and The Corner Activity.
Concept Mapping
In the Concept Mapping exercise, the word “oppression” is placed at the center of a piece of paper on the wall. Responding to the word, students brainstorm and visually “map out” their associations and thoughts. In one recent EVC workshop, participants wrote down instances of oppression they encounter in their daily lives, such as “exploitation,” “suppression of voices,” “controlling of information,” “systemic suppression,” “manipulation,” “humiliation,” “denial of rights,” and “abuse of power.” Mapping in this way helps participants understand oppression and its various manifestations, and how it shows up in their everyday world.
EVC recognizes that educational systems, too, can be hierarchical and oppressive. Our Freirian pedagogy directly mediates this, creating non-hierarchical participatory learning spaces that center the lives and experiences of our young people. This approach creates connections and opens avenues for discussion that might not emerge through traditional methods.
The Corner Activity
In the Corner Activity exercise, participants deepen their understanding of oppression through lived scenarios. Each corner in the room is designated as representing one of the four Is of oppression: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized.
Participants are then presented with various scenarios and tasked with discerning the type of oppression illustrated. They indicate their choice by moving to the corresponding corner. The activity transforms abstract concepts into something participants can grapple with, discuss, and debate in real-time. Students articulate their reasoning, listen to differing viewpoints and personal experiences, and collectively deepen their understanding.
The 4 I’s in Real Time
In July 2024, EVC once again facilitated The 4 I’s of Oppression workshop for youth and educators. Media educator Nadia Feracho adapted the workshop to accommodate her majority migrant student population. Speaking to the power of the workshop, Nadia said, “The 4 I’s is new to all of the students. They come in most of the time without the knowledge of the various types of oppression, or the language, but they come in with the experience.” The workshop gives students—in this case migrant youth—the language they need to name the oppressions they experience daily.
The conversation unfolded as students, including youth such as Jasmin and Angel shared personal insights and experiences with oppression in their daily and school lives. The discussion shed light on the unique challenges faced by immigrant communities. These included issues largely invisible to those outside the community, including grappling with an implicit hierarchy related to language proficiency.
Jasmin and Angel
Jasmin and Angel, students in EVC’s Youth Documentary Workshops and both immigrants from Mexico, discussed how the workshop impacted them.
Jasmin recalled:
At the beginning of the activity, my instructor told me that I need to think of a time where I experienced some type of oppression, and which kind. I started to write about my experience in my journal, and I started to think about one time I was on the train and a person started to attack me and say that because I'm Mexican I needed to go back to my country. I started to realize this kind of attack corresponds to interpersonal oppression; I began to ask what are the aspects that we need to solve this type of oppression?
Angel's story, on the other hand, revealed an issue within the educational system. He experienced bullying from fellow ESL students, revealing a troubling aspect of immigrant life in schools—an exclusionary hierarchy based on English language proficiency that pits students against each other, rather than encouraging mutual support and understanding.
The phenomenon isn't limited to student-based interpersonal oppressions; it reflects a broader systemic or institutional failing that centers proficiency to the implicit and explicit exclusion of recent arrivals and those at the beginning of their language acquisition process.
The workshop helped Angel and everyone understand that the interpersonal biases they were experiencing over language proficiency were ultimately grounded in institutional and, ultimately, ideological oppressions that centered the English language and assimilation over cultural and linguistic diversity.
Media educator Nadia summed up the young people’s learning: “Now that students have this language, they're starting to connect all of these systems of oppression to each topic that we talk about in our films. They're able to tell their family members about what they learned in EVC. I love that they get to share this information with them.”
Critical Literacy as a Foundation of Homeplace
In her Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks describes how critical thinking became the bedrock of her sense of safety, belonging, and power in an oppressive world: the “‘lived’ experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, became a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away.”
At EVC, the 4 I’s workshop is the incubator for the development of critical literacy—the ability to read, write, and rewrite the narratives that are the raw materials of one’s world. There is no place in EVC’s culture where this intersection of critical understanding, belonging, and action is more apparent than in the documentaries our young people have made over the years. Here are just a few examples from EVC's archive of films that explore various aspects of the 4 I’s:
“New Visions: A New Look at the American Dream” (2015) – This film examines migrant discrimination in the workplace and ideological oppression.
“Laws Written on My Body” (2023) – This documentary addresses sexism and institutional oppression, focusing on abortion rights and their societal impact.
“The Shade of My Beauty” (2024) – This film explores colorism and internalized oppression within Black and Latino communities.
“Breaking Through Stereotypes” (1994) – This documentary analyzes racial and ethnic stereotypes and their influence on interpersonal interactions.
These films are a small example of the scores of EVC media works that have offered youth leaders a uniquely powerful way to rewrite the narratives that are harming them, and to replace them with stories of critical understanding, hope, and power. And these films’ jumping off point is, in many ways, the framework presented in EVC’s 4 I’s workshop.