Community Learning
Lyrics on Lockdown
K45.1444 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Ella Turenne
This course will focus on the uses of the visual arts and spoken word as a tool for positive social change. Through hands-on collaboration with the Blackout Arts Collective—an organization that uses poetry, music, film, theatre and visual arts to educate people on issues around the prison industrial complex—and other grassroots organizations, students will create artistic and dialogical spaces for critically thinking about the crisis of incarceration in this country. Speakers may include representatives of the Prison Moratorium Project and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Possible readings include writings by Augusto Boal, Christian Parenti, Manning Marable, Bakari Kitwana, and Bryonn Bain. The course will culminate in a group creative project. Students do not need to be artists to participate in the course, however, creative building will be an integral part of the curriculum.
Shifting Focus: Video Production and Community Activism
K45.1445 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Mark Read
From the taping of the police beating of Rodney King to the burgeoning growth of Independent Media Centers around the world, video has become an essential tool of social struggle. This course will be a hands-on class in video production in the service of progressive social change. Class time will be used to: examine the biases of corporate-controlled media; learn the theory and history of video activism; develop basic camera and editing skills; and reflect on lessons learned in the field. Outside of class students will break into groups and collaborate with local community organizations in the conception and production of a short video piece, and subsequently strategize with those organizations about how to most effectively use video in their particular struggles. Readings will include selections from Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney and Thomas Harding.
Law and Community Activism
K45.1452 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Elizabeth OuYang
As activists and members of society we are confronted by laws all of the time, though we rarely see ourselves as actors in relationship to these laws. Why is that? We are taught that rights have been given by progressive courts, rather than won by popular struggle. Where do rights come from? Are they the same as laws? In this course we will examine the role of popular resistance and its relationship to laws. We will examine concepts of justice, law, obedience and disobedience as we work with community-based organizations. Through our study and discussions in class we will create a base for working in the community, and from working in the community we will create more of an understanding of theory. Three areas students can choose to work in are: community groups using the legal system to advance their goals, groups mobilizing community support to defend against unjust laws, and groups using international human rights standards to shift the discourse around the issue of rights. Readings will range from Howard Zinn and Emma Goldman, to David Kairys and Patricia Williams, as well as excerpts from political trials. We will also read reflections from community groups working with or against laws and segments of legal decisions.
Gentrification and Its Discontents
K45.1453 4 CR F 9:30-12:15 René Francisco Poitevin
This course focuses on the process of community restructuring known as “gentrification” – the displacement of poor residents and local stores by an influx of affluent and middle class people and businesses. Beginning with a case study of the Lower East Side (site of one of the most intense community battles against gentrification of the last thirty years), we’ll look at the theoretical and political debates around urban renewal, community development and neighborhood displacement. We’ll conclude, in collaboration with low income housing advocacy groups, with a closer look at some of the ongoing struggles and campaigns going on in New York City around affordable housing. Readings include Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier, Jane Abu-Lughod’s From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, and Christopher Merle’s Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate and Resistance in New York City.
Immigrant Rights
K45.1456 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Aarthi Shahani
In the last twenty years immigrants from an ever-increasingly diverse set of countries continue to flood the United States to find work to support their families, as the federal government simultaneously strips these immigrants of their rights as workers and residents of our nation. This course will outline basic immigration patterns in the last century, fundamental changes in the law that have affected these immigrants, including the drastic changes implemented after September 11th, and the ways in which immigrant workers are organizing in the workplace and elsewhere to sustain rights they have and win even more. As field placements, students will be working with immigrant workers’ centers that organize immigrant workers in different industries citywide.
Literacy in Action
K45.1460 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Maura Donnelly
This course combines volunteer work in New York City adult literacy and English as a second language programs with an academic introduction to the philosophy, history, and current issues of basic education. Students will work as volunteer teachers of reading and writing oral English or mentors at such institutions as the University Settlement, Union Settlement, International Rescue Committee, and Fortune Society. In class they will read about and discuss such key issues as which “basic skills” U.S. adults now need, which adults lack these skills and why, the implications for our economy, families, communities, and democracy, the instructional approaches developed for adults, and the steps that might be taken to build support for high-quality, adult basic-skills programs. Throughout the course, students will relate such issues to their own on-site experiences in class discussion and role-playing, and create a portfolio of writing that includes on-site observations, lesson plans, reflections, and a final analytical paper. Readings may include Auerbach's Making Meaning, Making Change; Horton and Freire's We Make the Road by Walking; and the journals, Focus on Basics and The Change Agent.