Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I am interested in hearing from and exploring strategies for teaching social action as an educator with students, vs. as an organizer amongst organizers. As an organizer, I am working with people who have already come together around a shared set of values/goals, as an equal. As a teacher, regardless of how I construct my classroom or treat my students, the power dynamic is different within the context of the institution. How do you navigate that? Are there best practices for avoiding prescriptions of ideology when my experience of social action emerges from a particular politics, and/or when the subject matter that I teach (such as Critical Race Theory) does indeed advance a politics, even if it's not, say, partisan politics. I'm also interested in seeing how others are thinking about their courses in terms of balancing a focus on "content" (or at least, a shared knowledge base from which to draw) and campaign research/development. In the preface to the Sample Course, the Teaching Social Action website mentions that the campaign element is introduced in the first week of class, as opposed to something that the course turns toward in its latter half, and I am interested in digging into what that looks like as a course-planning level.
Course Description:
Course Description
This 200/400-level course engages Asian American and Pacific Islander activisms, both historical and contemporary, as a knowledge base for building your own social actions. What justice movements and political positions informed Asian American organizing with the Third World Liberation Front? In the fight for Ethnic Studies in higher education? How do the legacies of Asian American organizing transcend the fiction of an isolated ethnic community, and take an active part in supporting and building liberation for all?
This course builds students' knowledge of Asian American activist histories and contemporary actions in order to support building their own social action campaigns centered around issues central to their own. They will carry out these actions collaboratively, over the course of the semester. It builds hands-on experience grounded in strategies for building power from and for minoritized communities.
Taught By:
Mika Kennedy
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity
Ithaca College
Read profile here.