“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
How and where do we learn? We are educated in a variety of settings. How do these “lessons” support or limit social status? Who benefits from school? What impact does race, class, gender, and other (but not less important) differences have on school experience? What role does education have in a sustainable society? Why do organizations train? Is there a place for education in: ecological/environmental justice? Political empowerment? Cultural equity? Economic stability? Inculcation of values/morality? How can the institution of education and the practice of schooling impact mass approach to some of today’s most pressing problems?
Through lecture, seminar discussion, theoretical critique, essay writing, and personal narrative, we will reveal, uncover and unpack these and other issues/questions. Education at Work will use narrative as a primary tool to investigate learning in a variety of settings and for a variety or reasons. We will illuminate the American education system as both a tool for social reproduction and as a site for creating social justice. We will examine ways in which educational institutions relate to structural inequality.
You will explore yours and others’ past and present experiences, as well as your beliefs and assumptions about education, school and schooling (curriculum, teachers, texts and pedagogy). A developing autoethnography/autobiography will be an important component of this course.