“One of the dangers we face in our educational systems is the loss of a feeling of community, not just the loss of closeness among those with whom we work and with our students, but also the loss of a feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the academy” (xiv–xv).
With “Beyond the Classroom Walls: Practicing Community as Celebration of Cultural Capital,” we seek to address the intersection between community and learning to mitigate the “loss of a feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond.” Rather than viewing the classroom as a unilateral exchange (e.g., instructors bestow knowledge upon students), we explore modes with which instructors and students alike share knowledge through community building.
Each panelist has a different access/entry point to our common theme but maintains a similar goal: 1) each recognizes students as whole, not as people who need to be “fixed” and “assimilated”; 2) each moves past “best practices” to conceptualize the post-pandemic return to the classroom as more humanizing than “business as usual,” creating curriculums that value and elevate the students’ lived experiences and cultures as capital.
Whether engaging in knowledge construction / creation or using technology as an equalizer, panelists acknowledge that “...the future is a multilingual and multiethnic one, regardless of attempts to suppress that reality” by consciously returning to the classroom to create spaces that push back against the overarching (and oft-fictitious) narrative of knowledge and learning in “the academy.” Through these moves, they refuse to “... [put] aside issues of (so-called) access and equity;” and instead have “repositioned the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices of working-class communities...as resources and assets to honor, explore and extend” a more inclusive understanding of “knowledge” (Paris and Alim, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, 3-5).
Dr. Ada Vilageliu-Diaz focuses on community writing to decolonize academic and narrative spaces that have traditionally erased Latinx and other BIPOC voices. Combining new teaching strategies with activism in the context of HBCU teaching, she uses oral history interviews and testimonies to teach students about the power of creating new narratives that empower marginalized communities. Through this mode of knowledge creation, Dr. Vilageliu-Diaz centers multilingualism as a valuable asset inside and outside the academic setting and demonstrates the potential for Latinx faculty and students to transform and influence the teaching of writing.
Cornelius Fortune contrasts the advantages and qualities of digital personal assistants, (e.g., Grammerly and ChatGPT) with their potential uses for underrepresented communities of color. He asks how we might use technology that enables others to “write without teachers” in a way that re-envisions the academic landscape as one that promotes access and engagement through community engagement.
Dr. Daniel Hengel focuses on the role of the syllabus in classroom space and the ways in which it contradicts “encourag[ing] a space for community building and critical citizenship,” highlighting how the language on the syllabus reflects exclusionary practices at educational institutions and fails to express educators’ concerns about inclusion and equity. Dr. Hengel shares examples from his own syllabi that promote community building in the classroom, to support students “to claim agency over our space; to make our room their room.”
Dr. Martha Green Eads discusses her experience with community reading that brings together formerly incarcerated women and university students to explore accounts of addiction and its effects on users, family members, friends, and society. Dr. Eads works with readers and students recovering from or impacted by substance abuse by drawing on resources in trauma awareness and resilience that considers substance abuse disorders’ origins as well as avenues out. Her paper addresses how shared experience through reading beyond the classroom resonates in hope and potential healing.
Panelists will address the question of community, access, and equity through various entry points with a presider to introduce each presenter. Each panelist will speak roughly 10 minutes with the hopes that ample time be given for discussion and audience participation.