It's Time to "Get Woke": Building a Community of Activists in a Social Justice Course

• In Event: 35.051 - Exploring Pedagogies of Resistance: Auto-Ethnographies on Initiatives to Promote Activism

Abstract

After being confronted with a clearly racist drawing left on a white board in a dormitory on campus, students in my Social Justice course proceeded to organize and demand the university respond. Using the classroom as a space to unpack and examine overt racism on “their” campus the students engaged in several actions, which challenged the university’s indifference towards issues of racism. For their efforts the students were both silenced and criminalized. Using auto-ethnographic narration, this paper examines the influence of a Social Justice course on the journey and evolution of HEAT, a multiracial student movement on campus, pushing back against anti-Black racism in a predominantly White University in upstate New York. How did the pedagogical choices I made in the classroom help to prepare and encourage students to take action and refuse to be silenced as they worked to push back against the anti-Black racism operating on campus? I examine my own choices to be proactive as I sought to meld my identities as an activist, scholar and teacher working to create a classroom space where students would subvert and challenge White-centric norms and practices in higher education. The seminal class questions were: “What are you going to do with this information you have learned about systems of oppression and the resulting inequities produced? Are you going to act or sit on the sidelines?” Many White students were as active as the students of color. Other White students were resistant to this form of activism. Even as I tell the story of HEAT, I try to analyze the differential response to my teaching. My paper is of scholarly significance because it provides a concrete example of how pedagogy led to a resistance movement. Like the other papers in the session it adds to the burgeoning literature on youth activism but adds a different dimension by its preliminary theorizing on students’ readiness to change (Tuck & Yang, 2014).

Author

• Denise G. Yull, Binghamton University - SUNY