Big Idea: Teaching for Social Justice at Antioch

[music]

[00:00:04] Jasper Nighthawk: Welcome to The Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity.

[music]

I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk, and today, we have a minisode about social justice in scholarship and pedagogy here at Antioch. For the past two weeks, our show’s editor, Lauren, and I have been diving into the themes and questions that run through all of our episodes. So far, we’ve covered Antioch’s many approaches to environmental justice and mental health justice. Today, for our final bonus episode, I want to dig into the ways that we can bring social justice into classrooms and into the world.

[music]

If Antioch has a calling card, this is it, a devotion to social, economic, and environmental justice that stretches back to our founding in 1852. It really was there right from the beginning. Antioch was the first university in the country to hire a woman to the title of full professor. Even before the Civil War was fought, Antioch made a point of admitting Black students.

This legacy continued into the 20th century when the school was repeatedly a leader in working for student success, from inventing the co-op model to eliminating letter grades. The university pioneered the practice of awarding older students with prior learning credits, giving official credit for things adults learned outside of formal classrooms. I personally love this last one because my dad took advantage of this program to finish his bachelor’s at Antioch when he was in his 30s.

Antioch has this long history of expanding opportunity to people who otherwise have been excluded from higher education. So much of this good work is carried forward by teachers and staff across our university today. Honestly, it’s a big part of why I’m proud to be an Antioch alum myself and to be the host of this show, but the past is just a story if the work doesn’t continue. It’s been great to hear this season some of the ways that the social justice mandate is influencing the work of different departments and to hear about how it gets applied in every field, from creative writing to the study of leadership.

In our interview with the poet, Victoria Chang, we heard about her idea of literary citizenship, something she’s worked to imbue into the curriculum of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

[music]

[00:02:50] Victoria Chang: For me, I think of literary citizenship as very simply just remembering that even when you’re writing anything, you’re not writing only in a vacuum, and you’re not writing just for yourself and for the benefits of yourself, that you’re a part of a larger community that you should try and give back to in some way that you might feel comfortable.

[music]

[00:03:20] Jasper: Victoria’s idea that as writers we shouldn’t just write for ourselves but we really need to give back to the communities that support us, is something that I really take to heart. I think it’s really especially important today when so many people are feeling atomized and alienated and lonely like they aren’t part of any community at all. At the same time, I think it’s hard to see how a degree program can promote something as big as citizenship. To me, it seems harder to teach that than to teach somebody to write a good short story. Where do you even start?

[music]

[00:03:57] Victoria: For me, actually, at a larger level, literary citizenship, I think, over time, has become this way in which I navigate the world and live the world in terms of building something or helping other people or enabling other people, helping to build, assisting, whatever words that we want to use to build a more equitable and just community and I wanted that when I was younger, I would’ve loved to have been a part of, but obviously wasn’t a part of.

I think for me, that’s how I’ve ended up thinking about literary citizenship is if we had a clean slate or as I always say in our program, if we had a table with just a bunch of butcher paper on top, how would you actually make something? Versus, “Oh, here’s this thing that’s totally broken, how shall we fix it?” The way that I think about anything that I’m working on is, “Okay, let’s imagine something totally different, and let’s imagine what we might be able to build if we didn’t have any constraints, and then we’ll go from there.”

[music]

[00:05:19] Jasper: This idea that we should start from the foundations and build from there without our imaginations constrained by what already is, in some ways, it’s so hopeful. Across Antioch, scholars and teachers are doing this work of reimagining their disciplines. In season one, we got to talk with Syntia Santos Dietz and Cathy Lounsbury about their work and their colleagues’ work trying to decolonize the curriculum in the clinical mental health counseling program.

In last week’s bonus episode about mental health, Lauren played some clips from Mariaimeé Gonzalez who’s one of the co-founders of Antioch’s new Latinx Mental Health & Social Justice Institute, which is doing similar work trying to elevate culturally responsive healthcare for Latinx people across the country. This work is going on in so many different areas, and really there are as many approaches as there are teachers. One place where I think this work is most important is in the study of leadership itself, which is a big emphasis here at Antioch where we have the Graduate School of Leadership and Change.

This season, we got to speak with a prominent scholar from that program, Donna Ladkin. She told us about the ways that newer theorists of leadership are challenging our culture’s implicit notions of what a leader looks like, mainly that leaders need to be loud and decisive and charismatic, and often male.

[music]

[00:06:49] Donna Ladkin: To give you an example, I worked in the UK for quite a long time. I did a lot of work with military leaders in the UK. We talked a lot about distributed and collective forms of leadership. One of the young military officers I was working with recounted a tale of his superior officer coming to watch a group of his cadets working with him and the superior officer said, “What are you doing? I don’t see any leadership here.”

The officer had been on this program said, “Well, no, actually there’s a lot of leadership here, it’s just what are you paying attention to. Are you paying attention to the collective dynamics that are going on here?” Whereas the superior officer was expecting leadership to look at one person yelling at other people. I think a reason to study leadership is to actually because it can expand our view about what leadership can look like.

[music]

[00:07:52] Jasper: Education can be liberation when it frees us of our preconceived notions like the idea that a leader has to look and sound a specific way. When you get free of that idea, you start to notice all sorts of leaders all around us, from leaders across our university who have spent years building and refining curricula to make them more just, to our students who come with open minds, which might be the bravest thing of all.

[music]

[00:08:25] Donna: I was just reading one of my student’s work today. It’s a reflective essay that she’s writing about herself as a leader, that she never imagined that she could be a leader because she wasn’t necessarily flamboyant and charismatic. That idea that in order to be a leader, you have to be outspoken and be able to garner a lot of attention and that sort of thing, I think that’s the assumption that many people have about being a leader.

In the essay that she wrote, she wrote that actually, she, as part of the program that she’s on, comes to appreciate that that actually isn’t necessarily what being a leader is about, that actually there are other ways of leading. I think we can limit ourselves by thinking that a leader has to look a certain way or act a certain way, when in fact we can still exercise influence and whole groups of people find direction in quieter ways and ways that are more collective and less bringing of attention to oneself.

[music]

[00:09:46] Jasper: This concludes our three bonus minisodes. We’re going to take a week off, and we’ll be back in your podcast queue two weeks from now with the first episode of season three. We’re so excited to have the chance to tell more of Antioch’s stories. [music]

For full show notes as well as transcripts, prior episodes, and more, visit our website, theseedfield.org. The Seed Field Podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor is Lauren Instenes. A special thanks to Karen Hamilton and Melinda Garland. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time and don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. from Antioch University this has been The Seed Field Podcast.

[music]

[00:11:05] [END OF AUDIO]