“The Philadelphia Center faculty and staff provided me with the steady support I needed to function in a drastically new environment, while simultaneously pushing me to see the world through a wider lens. The confidence I gained through my experiences in Philadelphia allowed me to overcome my fear of the unknown—opening wide the doors of the world.”
Abigail Stonerook, Kalamazoo College
Fall 2004
Women Organized Against Rape, Crisis Intervention Intern
City Seminars
Education at Work: Sites of Learning
Diana Waters
The last half of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st Century have brought drastic change to our ecological, economic, political, industrial/technological, and social landscapes. We have been pressed to change and inspired to hope. In understanding a platform to advance the American agenda, we will examine structural inequality and diversity, particularly as it pertains to race. This course seeks to empower us to decide our individual and collective roles in influencing the attitudes, ideas, and behaviors that will determine the future of our planet.
We will investigate education as a representative American institution. We will look at how we are educated in a variety of settings. How and where do we learn? How do these “lessons” support or limit social status and mobility? Who benefits from school? What impact do race, class, gender, and other (but no less important) differences have on school and/or workplace experience? What role does education have in a sustainable society? Is there a place for education in ecological/environmental justice? Social justice? Political empowerment? Cultural equity? Economic stability? Inculcation of values/morality? How can the institution of education support a call to action to address some of today’s most pressing problems?
Through presentation, seminar discussion, theoretical critique, essay writing, and personal narrative, we will reveal, uncover and unpack these and other questions. We will illuminate the American education system as both a tool for social reproduction and as a site for creating social justice. We will use several theoretical frameworks to highlight race as an everyday and educative process and to help us make sense of ourselves in relations to others. You will explore yours and others’ past and present experiences in relation to education, privilege, and marginalization, as well as your beliefs and assumptions about education, school, and schooling (curriculum, teachers, texts, and pedagogy). The use of narrative for understanding our own identities of privilege and marginalization, cross-cultural relationships, and paradigms for teaching and learning will be an important component of this course.