Taught By:
Marcelius Braxton
Director, Center for Social Change and Belonging
Student Affairs/Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion/Affiliated Faculty with multiple departments
Penn State University
Read profile here, here, and here.
Course Description:
This description is subject to change and I have some flexibility. The current description is this: "Youth Development and Arts-based Social Justice is an inter-domain course (GA/GS) intended to help students develop a critical understanding of the ways that sociopolitical factors influence youth development. The course will examine youth development as an indicator of broader community development and explore the inter-dependencies between the two by drawing both from the interdisciplinary fields of youth development and arts-based social justice. This course will assess the proposition that goals of social equity at the community, metropolitan, or regional scale cannot be achieved unless disparities in youth development are also addressed. Students will learn to read, interpret, discuss, and integrate information from the arts and social sciences. We will primarily, but not exclusively, focus on youth-led organizing and social justice movements as sites of youth development wherein young people have utilized the arts to mobilize and transform public policy, determine the destiny of their communities and challenge injustice (e.g., mass incarceration, educational inequality, and forced relocation). We will explore key concepts, theories, models, and examples of youth development and youth organizing from the perspectives of youth and adults who are actively engaged in building progressive movements for social justice through the arts. Throughout this exploration, we will pay close attention to issues of identity, culture, community, and politics. Students in this course will be introduced to key ideas and dispositions for working with diverse youth populations through a social justice lens. Students will engage in critical thinking based on their own identities, values, experiences and perspectives while also practicing deliberate and strategic open-mindedness rooted in the awareness of the personal and political limitations. Students will reflect upon their own developmental experiences and the contexts in which these played out in their weekly sketchbook entries and the two papers. The course will consider the mutual impact that arts and social movements have on each other. This will be assessed through classroom dialogue, students' sketchbooks and the integrative creative action project. The historical and theoretical materials will be contextualized by guest lectures, discussions, and performances involving visiting scholars, artists and activists.”
