EDUCATIONAL EQUITY AND JUSTICE
There is no doubt that curriculum and the teaching/learning axis is the lifeblood of any institution of higher education, but especially at Kalamazoo College. The ACSJL was tasked early on with infusing the K curriculum with social justice themes, pedagogies, and practices. As we were among the first institutions of higher education to do this, we were all learning in the process.
The ACSJL had three central programs which were embedded in its strategic plan. One was the Senior and Junior Chairs of the ACSJL, the Faculty Fellows Program, and Faculty grants, which supported social justice inquiry in research and curricular development. In the first 10 years, we had four chairs, nine faculty fellows, and allocated nearly seventy-five faculty grants.
You will see below, but also spread through the pages of this report, that due to the direct engagement of the ACSJL, there have been at least 15 new courses created and dozens more influenced through the mentorship and opportunities offered by the ACSJL. Significantly, the ACSJL was key to the creation of a Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) major and a Women, Gender and Sexuality major at the college. It should be noted that students and student research were central to both of these initiatives.
In addition, the ACSJL led scores of workshops for faculty on how to bring social justice analysis and pedagogy into the classroom; and we brought in professors whose practice served as models. The Academic Director (AD) led three groups of faculty on study trips and to important conferences to build their capacity in areas of social justice teaching and research. When we were developing the CES major, the AD took eight faculty to the national CES Conference in Chicago. The AD also developed a Memory and Social Justice Pedagogy Trip to South Africa for ten faculty and staff and led a group of eight faculty, staff, and one student to a conference on Mass Incarceration in Mississippi. The Executive Directors (EDs) also involved many faculty and staff as jurors for the selection of finalists and winners of the 2013 and 2015 Global Prize Convenings, and as guides and hosts for our global guests.
Finally, we created Praxis Center; the online website aimed at educating and strengthening the capacity of scholars, activists, and artists. Praxis Center was a go-to place for those looking for easily accessible articles and tools for social justice work in diverse areas and disciplines. It had a wide scope and as you will see below, as of December 31, 2019, our reach was 188,746 users in at least ten countries.
K College added a Critical Ethnic Studies major in 2014 following student activism and dialogue about racism on campus.
The ACSJL supported this work by listening and supporting students desperate for a more inclusive curriculum. The ACSJL collaborated with the members of the Theater and Anthropology Departments to invite Guillermo Gómez-Peña, MacArthur Genius awardee and self-confessed Mexican in the process of Chicanizization, to campus. In addition to performing, he met with students and had a huge impact on them. The students felt empowered enough to stage a protest to demand a more inclusive curriculum. The College took it up. The ACSJL made a second impact on this process by taking eight faculty members to the national Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in Chicago. Finally, Academic Director Dr. Lisa Brock served on planning and hiring committees for this major.
The ACSJL held leadership dinners for new faculty and visitors.
Dr. Brock, ACSJL Academic Director, interviews Dr. Reid Gómez who was hired to develop the Critical Ethnic Studies program. She is interviewed here in what the ACSJL called Leadership Dinners. These dinners were often held for visitors or newcomers to the College as a way for members of the College to get to know them. They were often asked about their journey so that students might see models of varied social justice leadership pathways.
ACSJL Academic Director Lisa Brock presented on Myths, Stereotypes, and the “Other” American History to new international students.
Three Faculty Members Speak
Dr. Adriana Garriga-López joined Kalamazoo College as both an Assistant Professor and the first Junior Chair of the ACSJL.
As junior chair, Dr. Garriga-López received professional development and participated on the Faculty Advisory Board. She is now an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology.
“The ACSJL supported my research in Puerto Rico through a Faculty Research Grant…It allowed me to travel to the archipelago in December of 2017, only three months after Hurricane Maria devastated the islands. This support was fundamental to set me on a new research path focused on the relationship between decolonization and disaster response and recovery, especially among small farmers working within the Latin American tradition of agroecology. “
—Adriana Garriga-Lopez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Kalamazoo College
Dr. Bruce Mills is one of two long-term members of the ACSJL Faculty Advisory Board (FAB).
This is the board that advised the Academic Director, Dr. Lisa Brock. As FAB members, they assisted in the choice of faculty fellows, invitees for global events, and many other programs.
“In addition to working as a Faculty Advisory Board member and gaining a deep sense of how to support inclusion and equity on campus, this work also enriched my study and teaching of American Literature and African American Literature. For instance, it provided the motivation for my collaboration with Kalamazoo community partners to create the Engaging the Wisdom Oral History Project, i.e., the recording and online access to stories of those involved with or influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.”
— Bruce Mills, Professor of English, Kalamazoo College
Ryan Fong, faculty fellow, 2019–2021
“I have continued to expand and improve the section of my Victorian literature survey on Poverty, Race, and Urban Crime based on the projects that have been funded by Arcus, including the trip to Mississippi. We also include a prison and abolition set of lessons in our WGS 101 courses, which has been enhanced by that as well. I will be teaching the WGS senior seminar next winter, and it will be on Abolition Feminisms.
All of this is setting the foundation for my next book project that will look at prisons and incarceration in the nineteenth-century British imperial context and will use critical abolitionist frameworks.“
— Ryan Fong, Associate Professor of English, Kalamazoo College
The ACSJL supported various academic programs by mentoring and integrating visiting faculty members whose work included a social justice analytic.
“Serving as a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership from 2015—16 played an integral role in my early academic career. This position allowed me the opportunity to create and teach two new classes on race, gender, and sexuality; present my research to the campus community, and write several articles for the Praxis Center. I was able to secure a tenure-track teaching position during this postdoctoral fellowship and have also since secured a book contract for my manuscript, The Famous Lady Lovers: African American Women and Same-Sex Desire before Stonewall (UNC Press). The Arcus Center has played an important role in my career and I am appreciative of the support and mentorship of Dr. Lisa Brock.”
— Dr. Cookie Woolner, Assistant Professor of History, University of Memphis
Radical Pedagogy Workshop
While there were dozens of pedagogy workshops at the ACSJL, the photos below are from Are you Woke? The Challenges, Successes, and Oh Nos of Teaching “Race” in the Multi-Racial Classroom in January 2020. Like most of our programs, it was attended by faculty, staff, students, and members of the Kalamazoo community.
ACSJL Faculty Staff Study Trip to South Africa, December 2016
Ten Kalamazoo faculty and staff spent two weeks visiting museums, archives, theaters, foundations, and meeting with artists, professors, poets, archivists, former political prisons, and student activists, We also had deep conversations with legendary leaders such as Superior Court founding justice, Albie Sachs and internationally renown actor/director John Kani. Dr. Lisa Brock, Academic Director and former anti-apartheid leader, developed and led this trip. The goal: to study memory of the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa as a way to re-imagine social justice pedagogy.
“The South Africa trip was a great experience for me on a personal level. It was so fascinating to learn the history of apartheid in South Africa. Being able to see the marks of Apartheid on the day-to-day lives of South Africans from income-inequality to massive poverty to high crime rates on the ground was a remarkable learning experience. As an economist, I had keen interest on the co-existence of a dual economy in the post-apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, a thriving and rapidly growing minority white economy and on the other hand, a massive poverty ridden majority black economy. This disparity has huge implications on the design, implementation and effectiveness of many economic policies including but not limited to housing, education, tax, growth and trade policies.”
— Menelik Geremew, Associate Professor of Economics, Kalamazoo College
“Participating in the faculty seminar to South Africa helped give me context to why students attending college in the U.S. may be interested in study abroad in SA, as opposed to other countries in Africa. From what I observed and learned, students have may have a very different experience in SA if they are not attuned to history and how the reality of the present day situation still very much depends on historical disenfranchisement. I appreciated learning more about the three major cities and their specific history, and how during even a short-term immersion experience significant learning can take place. “
— Dr. Margaret Wiedenhoeft, Executive Director of Center for International Programs, Kalamazoo College
“The trip to South Africa has been most impactful in my African Cinemas, Advanced Film Theory, and African Literatures classes in the English department. I will be teaching these classes again in 2021—22.
In African Cinemas, I discuss the South African pro-colonial film Voortrekkers. In the past, I discussed the film alongside the tradition of the Dingane Day reenactments. Following the trip, I bring in photographs I took at the Voortrekker monument, which are better than what was on their website, and show the monument’s celebration of Afrikaaner imperialist expansion, its erasure of the presence of indigenous peoples, and its one-dimensional representation of Africans. The trip helped me understand that, while the film no longer reaches large audiences, it has an afterlife in the reenactments and the monument, which continue to be visited by schoolchildren, who are exposed to its distorted narratives of South African History. I also teach both Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa and Freedom Park as counter-discourses to the Voortrekker monument.
In my 400 level Advanced Film Theory course, I discuss the District 6 museum, and the ways in which it has reconstructed the history of the culture of movie going in District 6. Speaking with the docent there helped me understand that the archival materials there are scattered, with some materials at the University of Cape Town and others at Michigan State University. The museum is working to try and bring some of this material back to South Africa. This, along with work by Verne Harris of the Mandela Foundation, is central to our class’s discussion of archives and history.
In my African Literatures class, we watch a performance of John Kani’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and following the trip, I now show images of the Market Theater and discuss the many threats Kani endured during his time with the theater and his strategies for its survival. Overall, the trip has given me a means of more richly contextualizing the films and texts in relation to the communities from which they emerged.
— Babli Sinha, Associate Professor of English, Kalamazoo College
Praxis Impact
“Thanks for this, Lisa. We need critical history so much in this year of fake news and daily lies. Your work always gives me hope as it honors our families.”
“I find the articles put out by the Praxis Center to be very informative. Although it is hard to directly use the knowledge I gain in the teaching of the content of my physics courses, I do find that I frequently gain insight which helps me work with an increasingly diverse group of students in my classes. Also, I better understand the structural barriers that exist at the College and whenever I can I push for eliminating these barriers.”
— Jan Tobochnik
“Congratulations for the ACSJL’s tenth year! I only came to subscribe to Praxis last year, but as an emerging academic, it’s been a good resource for teaching and for organizing, with practical tools like syllabi, and resources that can be shared with students and peers, such as views and histories from various identities, backgrounds and causes, all working toward social justice. Thank you all for your important work!”
— Liz Kim
“I’ve appreciated the work of ACSJL since I was a student at K right as the center was starting, and the Praxis publications are some of the main ways I stay connected to the institution. I appreciate the variety of topics, the clear and accessible the way the authors present nuanced and specific issues, and the relevance to current events as well as larger movements.”
— Dana Robinson
“I truly appreciated your accurate and detailed analysis of Black resistance to a racist/white supremacist US culture that has sought to dominate and exploit our lives since slavery. This article will forever be a great reference piece! You have certainly provided critical historical information and a politically enlightening overview from a perspective that we all can loudly applaud.”
"My time at the Arcus Center as Praxis Center editor is one that I will always treasure. Working at the Arcus Center allowed me to connect with so many impactful people all over the world. The experience deepened my politics and my resolve to continue the struggle to build justice in this world. A community and educational space, intergenerational and decolonial to its core, focused on developing a new generation of freedom fighters while strengthening those of us on the frontlines—the Arcus Center was a one-of-a-kind gem."
— Sandy Hudson, Former Praxis Editor in Residence, Co-Founder Black Lives Matter Canada
“During its tenure, Praxis Center offered weekly insights into the current political moment. As the brainchild of Dr. Lisa Brock, the blog embodied a commitment to rigorously engage with social, political and cultural issues. But Praxis Center was more than a blog; it was a continuously growing and evolving community of thinkers and doers that offered a sense of belonging and hope for making a more just and humane world. “
— Alice Kim, former Praxis Content Editor, Director of Human Rights Practice, University of Chicago, Pozen Center Human Rights Lab
What People are Saying
“It brings to light so much that many Blacks try to suppress due to the air of despair and hopelessness. Our young people, my son included, feel that voting is a waste of time as their vote will not be properly counted and exercised. I’m not sure of all of the answers, but I tell him we cannot stop fighting. Interestingly enough, where patriotism is concerned, Blacks and Hispanics join the armed services to get a “leg up” on opportunities life generally offers them. I have served as many of my friends have and we are proud of that time in our lives. It’s not that we are not patriotic or have disdain for this country, we want to have the same rules in the game as others.”
“I mentioned that there seemed to be a certain reticence on the part of the students. You suggested that I tell them what drew me to the subject and ask the students to do the same. I did this and the change was palpable. The students seemed really engaged, and their own stories of what brought them to the course were fascinating. Our discussions are lively and candid, and I think some of this shift has resulted from integrating our own stories into the subject of study. Many thanks!”
— Babli Sinha, Associate Professor of English, Kalamazoo College
“As a professor at K, it has changed how I think about the inclusiveness and accessibility of my classes. I've changed my courses as a result.”
“I wrote a short reflection for the American Psychology Association Division 44 newsletter that was informed by things I have learned at the ACSJL”
“Yes – very much appreciate the depth you provide here. And the words you shared recently about how white families are now having the conversations that black families have long had…powerful. Thanks.“