Education and Resistance in Community-based Youth Organizations

EDU A147 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

The purpose of the course is to provide students the opportunity to engage with and discuss the historical, ideological, and contemporary issues surrounding community-based programs engaging youth. Drawing on theoretical and empirical literature and current events, students will think critically about how political and social context shapes community-based education. Students will examine how educational policy and the confluence of power, race, class, gender, and broader systems of oppression shape community-based programs, the lives of youth workers and community-based leaders, and youth participants. This course explores how these spaces inform the educational experiences, political identity development, and organizing and activist lives of multiply-oppressed and vulnerable youth. Topics will include: grassroots organizing and activism, academic outcomes and access to higher education, full-service community-schools/school-community partnerships, social identity development, liberatory and culturally sustaining pedagogy, funding and philanthropy, healing justice, neoliberalism, and privatization in community-based afterschool education.  Students will examine the paradoxical nature of community-based youth organizations as nurturing spaces of resistance for youth and sites of conflict and social reproduction. Ultimately, this course will challenge students to think critically about community-based youth organizations and their capacity for educational, political, and social change for youth and communities. Community-based leaders and youth work professionals are fully integrated into the course as guest lecturers and thought-partners.