Transformative Social Justice Teaching: Centering Students and Faculty in Our Own Educational Experiences to #StayWoke

• In Event: Tales of Two Institutions: Social Justice Teaching Confronts Contradictions of “Student Success” in Higher Education

Abstract

Overview: At the university ranked highest in the nation for the retention and graduation of Black students, academic success interventions include adaptive learning tools, tutors, workshops and technology-enabled advising as solutions to problems of inequity. As a research-participant in a transformative social justice teaching intervention, I designed and taught a lesson about racial oppression using the films: “Get Out” and “13th”. To plan this lesson I immersed myself in research on African American literacy traditions (see Paper 3 above) with androgogical (adult learning theory) strategies. Students’ voice and identity were integral in the development of all lessons taught in the course, including the one I co-taught with another graduate student. The interdisciplinary team of faculty assisted students in understanding social, political and historical concepts through Africana, Latinx, Indigenous and Asian American scholarship that offered accurate perspectives. Used more widely, such pedagogical/andragogical strategies continue to cause students to experience disorientation (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; King & Swartz, 2016; Matias, 2016). Reading and discussing scholarship that centers traditionally marginalized narratives can cause students to experience a “disorienting moment” (Quigley, 1995). I, too, can attest that coming into a social consciousness to “stay woke” shifts our understanding of previous educational experiences. Although this information causes African-Americans great trauma, they are expect to be successful without emotional care. (Grills et al., 2016). A part of teaching for social justice is empathy. If universities seek to empathize with students whose narratives have been co-opted and pushed to the margins, then teaching and learning must also support a process of healing. This paper takes up Cooper-Lewter’s (1999) stages of grief to analyze the way the lesson I taught was designed to support students not just in coping with disorientation but overcoming it. This means preparing students to #StayWoke—to become critically aware of societal issues that without interrogation are accepted as truths.

Significance: As a graduate student in Teacher Education, I hope this work will contribute to the growing body of literature on urban preservice teacher preparation and transformative social justice teaching (Meacham, 2000).

Theoretical Framework: This paper employs Afrocentric theory which focuses on Collective Consciousness, Accurate Scholarship, and Subjects with Agency (King & Swartz, 2016). It also uses the lens of Black grief (Cooper-Lewter, 1999) to detail the stages through which students progress from dysconsciousness (King, 1991) to critical consciousness.

Data: Data used in this paper are personal reflections and lesson planning content. Each informs the development of shared definition of social justice and student success.

Findings/Conclusions: While increased retention and graduation rates merit recognition as measures of “student success,” this paper describes contradictions. Analysis of this lesson suggests that undergraduate, masters and doctoral students need faculty of color and other critical scholars who can support them in negotiating the shifting terrain that occurs when we experience scholarship that tells the truth and honors marginalized and oppressed groups. Also, when students can identify themselves in the curriculum, they work to redefine the dominant narrative.

Author

• Glenda Chisholm, Georgia State University