Congratulations to Erica Kohl-Arenas, the first recipient of the Faculty Award for Outstanding Achievements in Diversity and Social Justice Teaching! This is a new award that is specifically designed to recognize faculty members whose work has demonstrated a significant commitment to social justice.
Erica’s social justice teaching includes a Milano course, Participatory Community Engagement, that she developed and has run four times through community partnerships including with the Hunts Point Alliance for Children, The New York Theater Experience, Tenants and Neighbors NYC, the Red Hook Community Justice Center, and the Center for Court Innovation. In this class students gain an understanding of the theory behind participatory community development, popular education and critical pedagogy and collectively discuss questions of powerlessness, marginalization, poverty, and inequality and how participatory processes have inspired community driven and owned approaches to addressing these enduring problems. Students also engage with current academic critiques of participatory models (Participation: the new tyranny?) in order to learn how to critically analyze and evaluate participatory processes in the context of historical patterns of co-optation and control of poor people’s movements. In the class partnerships with local organizations and communities students learn and use key participatory facilitation strategies.
This award will be publicly presented at the university-wide 2014 Commencement Ceremony, which will take place Friday, May 23 at 11 a.m. at Madison Square Garden.
