By Jimena Alvarado, Social Justice Educator and Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty, Portland Community College
EverydaySocialJustice is an OER website for teachers or folks who are just curious and want to learn more. On the site, you can find all the teaching materials for a few courses on social justice, so people can walk themselves through it or talk about it with a “book” group.
This site is a unique resource because there are almost no complete curricula available for folks who teach intersectionality. This site shares the entire curriculum for multiple college courses that introduce the basics of social justice. The readings, videos, and conversation guides are meant to get people to re-think what they’ve learned about 18 different kinds of oppression. The courses use an intersectional feminist perspective, so the focus is on the ways that all oppressions connect; the similarities between racism and classism, the connections between sexism and ageism, the ways that ableism affects transphobia. One of the hardest things about equity work is talking with people about the worst parts of humanity, the ways we hurt each other on purpose. These courses help you think about ways of doing better through empathy, compassion, and patience.
Flipping the Classroom
Instead of lectures and traditional academic articles, the courses use simple words and popular culture materials to think through complex ideas. The lesson plans are built around 2-hour conversations that analyze real-life scenarios and help people connect emotionally to the ideas (flipped classroom pedagogy).
These courses center on conversations and problem-solving; the best part of a flipped classroom is getting to apply the theoretical concepts with the support of classmates and the instructor. The pedagogy of Paulo Freire drives the design of the courses: applied problems that are relevant to the student’s lives, in their own language, to help develop critical consciousness and emancipatory and transformative education. These are some examples from the courses:
- In the early lessons, students explore their own identities in a social location map that uses 18 different dimensions of oppression and work in groups to come up with 5 examples of privilege for each of the identities.
- Later in the term, they explore the impact that visibility and non-visibility have on how the patterns play out for each oppression. For example, when learning about non-visibility and the dynamics of closeting and disclosure, the students have to weigh the difficult choices that queer parents have to make about keeping themselves and their children safe.
- When we study the economics of reproductive labor and the value of childrearing to a society, students work with scenarios that help them visualize the famine and disruption that would result from not having enough young people to keep a society functioning; and they also calculate the salary that a worker would earn for 20 years of child-rearing services.
- The concept of Equity sounds simple until we start to realize the radical restructuring that it is proposing. In the applied work we explore individual examples of differentiated treatment and restitution and finish with reparations.
Online or On-Campus
Additionally, there is one course that is designed to be taught online, centering around a weekly 1-hour synchronous conversation in small groups. Each of the lesson plans include the prep materials and prep questions, the conversation guides, extra materials, and most of them include a summary video.
Online students have commented that they were initially resistant to the idea of synchronous conversations, but that it truly allowed them to deepen their understanding. On-campus students have talked about the impact of spending the majority of the class time solving scenarios in small groups instead of following a lecture.
Everyday Social Justice Courses
- The Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course provides an overview to shared patterns between multiple forms of oppression, as well as an emphasis on ally skills, reproductive labor, and capitalism.
- Queer Studies emphasizes empathy and understanding between the many identities housed under the Queer umbrella, as well as a reimagination of families and relationships.
- The Women, Social Change and Activism course strives to explore systems and structures and ways of pushing back; with an emphasis on student activism and academic rights.
- The Intercultural Women’s Studies course gets into international systems of domination: globalization, capitalism, diaspora, and migration.
This work was supported through four Open Educational Resources grants, so this site can be helpful for teachers who are looking for activities, materials, and inspirations for their own lessons. Content on Everyday Social Justice is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) meaning that everyone is welcome to use any and all of the materials and alter them, but must attribute back to the website, and don’t use them for commercial purposes.
Featured Image: Everyday Social Justice Logo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.