Majoring in Movement Building: The Praxis of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1: Experiential and Community-Engaged Pedagogy

Abstract

This talk will explore how UCSC’s unique community studies program guides students to understand and meet this historical moment. Guided by Freire’s notions of praxis and popular education, as well as bell hooks' understanding of critically engaged pedagogy, Community Studies delves into the theory and practice of social change in the classroom, through experiential learning and through student and faculty research. The heart of our major is the field study sequence in which students spend 6 months working for and with social change organizations of their choosing, including those working for racial, gender, LGBTQ+, immigrant, environmental, economic and food justice. They are prepared for this endeavor through courses in community organizing, social movements and critical social theory. They also learn ethnographic methods in order to conduct original research on how their organization speaks to the pressing questions of our day. This talk will describe the movement building focus of community studies as an arena in which students develop analytic, professional and social-emotional skills, as well as the challenges of maintaining such a pedagogy in the overlapping contexts of precarity, neoliberalism, fascism and backlashes against diversity of all kinds. It asks how the current political conjuncture can and must inform our teaching as well as our research so that new generations of students can develop the necessary skills to imagine and build new futures.

Author

• Alison Hope Alkon, University of California-Santa Cruz