Project: The Social Justice Classroom

For my fellowship project, I decided to build a website dedicated to crowdsourcing antiracist pedagogical material. I developed this idea last year while I was a fellow for MSU’s Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, and was inspired by Ronjaunee Chatterjee’s, Alicia Mireles Christoff’s, and Amy R. Wong’s 2020 article, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies, which was published in the L.A. Review. Shortly after, I noticed Pearl Chaozon Bauer, Ryan D. Fong, Sophia Hsu, and Adrian S. Wisnicki, were developing Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, 2021, https://undiscipliningvc.org. This is the closest website in objective to the one I am proposing, but with one major distinction.

Assured that I am not alone in the desire to implement new reading material and assignments dedicated to DEI in my classroom, this website is transdisciplinary in nature. It is not just for humanists but crosses disciplines and departments to help build a dialogue and network of instructors open to enhancing their efforts and impact for social justice and sharing the innovative material they use to promote their efforts. Although there are many websites you can visit to gain ideas for new assignments, syllabi, and reading material, it is difficult to find a website tailored to a specific theme. What’s more, when you visit these sites it can seem as if you are on your own to engage with the material and can only cross your fingers that once you tailor it to your own methodology or objective, it will all go smoothly. Therefore, along with the submissions that are to be hosted on the website, each submission will have the option to include a brief interview, kept on an audio file, to help contextualize and situate the associated submission. From these interviews, visitors can then gain a sense of the specific objective, audience, and decision-making process that went into creating a specific lesson plan, syllabus, assignment, etc. It is also intended to host material that may not be as easily accessed, such as zoom talks dedicated to social justice. As of now, the site is only open to collegiate instructors for available networking purposes but will hopefully be open to K-12 instructors in the future.