The Classroom as Counter-Archive: Place-Based Pedagogies of Community Empowerment (https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22492 )
Salve Regina University. Newport, Rhode Island
Organization: NEMLA
Event: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22492
Education is an ideal means of empowerment, for it enables students to take ownership of the historical and personal archives that stand for their communities. This panel regards the classroom as a privileged site of such empowerment—particularly for students from immigrant families—and seeks proposals on how to equip them to become active agents in producing their own interpretations of the cultural and spatial memory they share with their forebears.
We draw inspiration from courses in which students articulate their personal, familial, and communal relationships with the tangible and intangible spaces of the city they inhabit: from their own homes to the streets they traverse daily, the buildings, neighborhoods, and monuments they encounter, and the individual and social practices that animate them. Setting their lived experience against the historical archives that purport to represent them, students produce analytical descriptions of urban space. Their work collectively assembles a shared repository of cultural memory - a "counter-archive" that weaves together place-based learning, immigration histories, and autobiographical narrative. In classrooms of diverse composition, this work empowers along more than one path. Immigrant students illuminate the place of their communities within the urban social fabric, while others discover—in their own projects and in those of their classmates—insights that transform how they perceive the city and their own identities in relation to it.
We invite educators across languages, periods, and disciplines to share pedagogical projects and activities—assignments, archives, community-engaged work, digital repositories, creative and testimonial writing—that treat teaching as a practice of empowerment. We especially welcome contributions that reflect on the theory of change behind their work: when does a classroom project produce agency, and how do we know?
https://www.nemla.org/convention.html
Mario Valero