Community Engagement and Social Justice, Part 2

This week, we are going to think further about how our work with community organizations fits into the bigger social justice picture.  So, please read the article, "Justice and Charity," which is posted on Blackboard, and come prepared with responses to the following questions:

1) What issue/s is the organization you are working with trying to address?  How does the organization define the issue?

2) How is the organization trying to address this issue?

3) How does this organization relate to other organizations trying to address the same issue within the area/country/etc.?

Community Engagement and Social Justice (part 1)

For the next couple of weeks, we are going to focus on your experiences at your community engagement sites and how those experiences connect with what we've been debating in class.  

This week, there will be time for each of you to share and process some of your experiences with the class.  Thus, please come prepared with thoughts on the following questions:

1.  What have you been doing?  What interactions have you had with either the people running the organization and/or the people who the organization serves?  (Think very concretely about this.  Have you been filing papers?  Folding clothes? Sending emails? Etc.)

2.  How have your experiences and interactions made you feel?  

3.  What sort of questions about social justice have come up for you in these experiences?  

Additionally, please read Ann Green's article, "Difficult Stories:  Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness," which you'll find on blackboard.  

The struggle continues

I thought that, this coming week, we might try a different format. Instead of a head-to-head debate, Groups 2 and 4 will each present a 10-minute response to the question below (based upon the readings), then take questions from the audience, and then the two teams will work together to synthesize both of their arguments as well as the new ideas generated by the questions and discussion.

The readings are Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and Cornel West’s “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The question is this:

If we imagine the struggle for social justice today to be a continuation of the struggle undertaken during the 50s and 60s by what Dr. Vincent Harding called the Black-Led Southern Movement for the Expansion of Democracy, then how should we — as a social justice community on a college campus — bring that struggle to DU? What should our goals be? And how can we realize them? 

I encourage the teams to think big. As Dr. Harding pointed out, the struggle for social justice isn’t about merely reforming what’s wrong; it’s about creating a new world. Our agenda for DU should be likewise imaginative, ambitious, and transformative. So, as always, don't feel limited by the readings; instead, use them to generate ideas of your own.

Speaking of the readings: they're on Blackboard, in the Content folder.