"How May I Be Affecting This Person's Personal Social Justice?" Conceptions of Social Justice Among Rutgers-Newark Honors Living Learning Community Students

• In Event: Imagined and Realized Places: Spatializing Youth Political and Racial Identity Development

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary analysis that is a part of a much larger qualitative study examining how several Newark-based undergraduate students and alumni grapple with the notion of “social justice” within a Newark-based honors college program that is explicitly dedicated to recruiting social justice-oriented students and cultivating their commitment to social justice.
Newark, NJ has emerged as one of several cities in which young people have organized and taken direct-action to challenge local structures of racism. In 2015, to resist several racially inequitable policy decisions, Newark’s Student Union organized a multi-generational coalition to lead a city-wide student walkout, a multi-day sit-in, and traffic stoppage. This contemporary local activism is in step with Newark’s legacy of civil rights era activism and public uprisings in response to forms of anti-Black violence carried out by law enforcement (Curvin, 2014).
Rutgers University-Newark’s Honors Living Learning Community (HLLC) has, in a way, endeavored to harness this community’s spirit of socio-political consciousness, by designing a program that seeks to both recruit students based on their commitment to “social justice” and to cultivate a community ethos and learning experience that is grounded in “social justice.” HLLC “scholars” are admitted based on their performance in group and individual interviews, a personal statement, and their commitment to “social justice.” Accepted students – about half of whom are from the Newark area, 40% of whom are community college graduates, and most of whom are students of color – receive a scholarship which covers room and board, live together for the duration of the program, and take a minimum of 18 credits in HLLC-designated courses which seek to cultivate students’ commitment to social justice praxis (HLLC, 2017).
This preliminary analysis draws on two initial interviews (one with a current student and one an HLLC alumnus) and one participant observation convened for a cohort of HLLC students to present their “Community Transformation Project Proposals” to understand how the HLLC students learn from the program about the meaning, value, and practice of ”social justice.” Drawing on Jackson’s (1990) theory of hidden curriculum, we explore the ways in which teaching and learning occur in oft-unintended ways, outside of the official curriculum, through HLLC culture. Attending closely to the significance of Newark context and its history, we examine if and how HLLC students develop politically in relation to questions of inequality, race/ism, and social change, and how (if at all) their political sense-making is shaped by their experiences in the Newark community prior to their time in the HLLC, and how (if it all) HLLC may contribute to strengthening or changing these prior views. Preliminary findings suggest that social justice elements of HLLC’s educational program prioritize critical education while also embracing a change ethos rooted in social entrepreneurship and identity affirmation. The implications of such an approach may be reflected in students’ understanding of social justice largely as a personal politics (e.g, respect for diversity) or as individual acts and less about organized struggle for community power.

Authors

• Charity Anderson, Rutgers University - Newark

• Kevin L. Clay, Virginia Commonwealth University