Teaching With/for Praxis: Designing an Undergraduate Major on Education and Social Justice

• In Event: Praxis for Racial Justice: Undergraduates as Activists and Engaged Scholars

Abstract

Delivered by two faculty advisors, the first paper frames and situates the presentations by undergraduate researchers. It begins by describing the origins of the interdisciplinary major on education and social justice and the major’s commitment to praxis (Freire, 1968/2000). Through praxis, undergraduates are supported to do more than critique social and educational contexts, but work to change them.
The paper offers key principles and signature components of the major – including an 11-course “sequence of study” that scaffolds the development of complex theoretical analysis and social justice-oriented practices. The developmental sequence is made up of educational experiences (a combination of courses, extra-curricular experiences, mentoring, cohort-based capstone, and faculty advising). Through these various experiences, students come to critically interrogate one’s social world, reflexively examine one’s own social location within that world, and engage in community-based social change. A signature of the major is a three-semester long “praxis project sequence” (taught by the same professor), beginning in the second semester of the junior year, and ending in a capstone Praxis Project Thesis. The “praxis project” responds to the calls for critical praxis in higher education, resisting the pull towards ‘abstract theorizing’ and instead, spending “more time on the ground with communities and groups who are demanding justice around issues that affect people’s daily lives” (Stovall, p. 8).
After identifying the key principles and signature components of the major, the paper explicates a theoretical framework for a community of praxis (CoPrax), which we have been researching and developing over the last five years. Extending the communities of practice (CoP) and communities of inquiry (CoI) bodies of scholarship, we make the case that communities of praxis affords a more nuanced understanding of learning, community, and practice in a university experience that centers the uncertainties inherent in community engagement for social justice. The papers/presentations that follow – from the undergraduates – illustrate how CoPrax (or being in a community of praxis) can enable activism and engaged scholarship at the undergraduate-level.
Our paper has several theoretical and practice-based implications. First, it offers the major as a “telling case” for innovating an undergraduate major on education and social justice. Second, as practitioner-researchers in higher education, we inhabit the space between theory and action, and wrestle with our own teaching in ways that we believe will engender a community of undergraduates undertaking work of social, personal, and intellectual consequence. Finally, we build on an undertheorized framework – “communities of praxis” or CoPrax – as for designing, implementing, and researching educational programs for community-engaged scholarship and transformative action.

Authors

• Jie Yie Park, Clark University

• Eric J. DeMeulenaere, Clark University