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Co-creating a New Anti-Racist Curricular Requirement

National SAP Roundtable 2021

“We demand the College to adopt a holistic approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion and anti-racism in education and practices for the next academic years.”

Aaniyah Alexander, Shreya Bhutani, Sa'De Black, Miles DeClue, Amirah Hewitt, Aaliyah Joseph, Nisha Marino, Van Nguyen, Andreanna Papatheodorou, and Alison Cook-Sather

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Bryn Mawr College, PA, USA

Strike website and resources: https://linktr.ee/brynmawrstrike

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Challenge:

As documented in other contexts, curricular contestation (Luckett, 2016) can support students and staff becoming “reorganizer[s] of institutional machinery” and rippling the “patterning of power” in higher education (paperson, 2017, p. 55, p. 137).

The challenge is how to recognize and compensate student experience, vision, and labor as essential to conceptualizing and developing a DEI/A-R curricular requirement when faculty hold the majority of the decision-making power regarding curricular change.

Our partnership initiative addresses the challenge through the creation by our college’s president in the Fall-2021 semester of a Working Group of faculty and students and a credit-bearing independent study for the same group of students.

Our charge: work with the standing Curriculum Committee to develop a potential DEI/A-R curricular requirement that must be voted on by the entire faculty.

What do people see as the challenges in such a situation? Add your thoughts here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lWhQtbFUXw9oOZMhx8dbI6STa3-qX9WzfrCkEl1NL3A/edit?usp=sharing

What do people see as possible solutions? What have you tried? What can you imagine given these challenges?

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The paradox for discussion

How the creation of the Working Group and independent study

  • acknowledges, makes space for, and compensates students for their vision and labor

but

  • puts us in tension, in terms of power and responsibility, with the standing Curriculum Committee

and

  • creates even more complex power dynamics with the full faculty ultimately responsible for approving or rejecting the proposal for the new curricular requirement.

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The steps we are taking include:

  • embracing the charge posed by the president of the college
  • working within and against the structure of the existing faculty governance, and
  • visioning within the co-created liminal space of the independent study to develop a proposal that, as la paperson (2017) calls for, emerges from within but pushes beyond the existing structures.

What do people recommend as we navigate this situation? Add your thoughts on page 3 of this Google Doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lWhQtbFUXw9oOZMhx8dbI6STa3-qX9WzfrCkEl1NL3A/edit?usp=sharing

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References and Resources

Cook-Sather, A., & Graham, E. (under review). Student leadership: Working within, between, and beyond institutional structures. In P. A. Woods, A. Roberts, M. Tian, & H. Youngs (Eds.), Handbook of Leadership in Education. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar Publishing.

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Freeman, R. (2016). Is student voice necessarily empowering? Problematising student voice as a form of higher education governance. Higher Education Research & Development, 35(4), 859-862.

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Hussain, M. (2015). Why is my curriculum white? https://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why-is-my-curriculum-white/

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Kappel, J. (2019). ​​Student participation in institutional governance and decision making: Having a seat at the table. ACUI. The Bulletin. https://www.acui.org/resources/bulletin/bulletin-detail/2019/04/03/student-participation-in-institutional-governance-and-decision-making-having-a-seat-at-the-table

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Luckett, K. (2016). Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: a view from South Africa. Teaching in Higher Education, 21(4), 415-428.

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May, W. P. (2010). The history of student governance in higher education. College Student Affairs Journal, 28(2),207-220.

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Mbembe, A. J.. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), 29-45.

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paperson, la. (2017). A Third University is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.

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Turner, D. C. III. (2021). Making the world go dark: The radical (im)possibilities of youth organizing in the afterlife of slavery. In C. A.

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Grant, A. N. Woodson, & M. J. Dumas (Eds). The future is black: Afropessimism, fugitivity, and radical hope in education (pp. 107-116).