Abstract
The frequency and brutality of social injustices played out upon the personal, local, national, and global levels prompted a response from faculty and staff at Benedictine University that took the form of a Teach-In on Social Justice. It is presented here as a model to address the need for social justice education through high-impact learning practices, particularly for underrepresented and at-risk students. The Teach-In has developed into a co-curricular structure embedded within the university culture, and its annual program draws over 1,000 students, faculty, and staff on a racially and religiously diverse campus. Mission-centric and tied to the formal general education curriculum learning goals, the Teach-In is a collaborative undertaking of both the academic/curricular and student life areas of the university. This Teach-In model integrates scholarship, activism, and civic engagement with the goal of individual transformation and structural reform within the institution. In addition to conveying the mechanics of the Teach-In and arguing for its value as a permanent, institutional co-curricular structure, this chapter situates the Teach-In within influential discourses of social justice education concerning critical pedagogy, twenty-first-century liberal education, and US women of color feminism.
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Notes
- 1.
Benedictine University is located in Lisle, Illinois, and is about 28 miles west of Chicago.
- 2.
Familiar examples of co-curricular activities, programs, and experiences may include student journalism, artistic/musical endeavors, cross-cultural projects, mock trials, debate competitions, student government, science/engineering teams and competitions, internships, community involvement projects, entrepreneurial experiences and innovation, etc.
- 3.
Interlocking oppression, as Taylor explains, is at the heart of the meaning of intersectionality: “The Combahee women did not coin the phrase ‘intersectionality’—Kimberlé Crenshaw did that in 1989—but the CRC did articulate the analysis that animates the meaning of intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering” (p. 4).
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Somers, P., Chen, W.C. (2021). A Twenty-First-Century Teach-In for Inclusion and Justice: Co-curriculum at the Intersections of Scholarship, Activism, and Civic Engagement. In: Parson, L., Ozaki, C.C. (eds) Teaching and Learning for Social Justice and Equity in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81143-3_8
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