Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education

Equity and Access in the College Classroom

Nana Osei-Kofi, Bradley Boovy, Kali Furman, Nana Osei-Kofi, Bradley Boovy, Kali Furman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367551032
• eBook ISBN: 9781000351514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is a book for anyone with an interest in teaching and learning in higher education from a social justice perspective and with a commitment to teaching all students. This text offers a breadth of disciplinary perspectives on how to center difference, power, and systemic oppression in pedagogical practice, arguing that these elements are essential to knowledge formation and to teaching. Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is structured as an ongoing conversation among educators who believe that teaching from a social justice perspective is about much more than the type of readings and assignments found on course syllabi.

Drawing on the broadest possible definition of curriculum transformation, the volume demonstrates that social justice education is about both educators' social locations and about course content. It is also about knowing students and teaching beyond the traditional classroom to meaningfully include local communities, social movements, archives, and colleagues in student and academic affairs.

Premised on the notion that continuous learning and growth is critical to educators with deep commitments to fostering critical consciousness through their teaching, Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education offers interdisciplinary and innovative collaborative approaches to curriculum transformation that build on and extend existing scholarship on social justice education. Newly committed and established social justice pedagogues share their experiences taking up the many difficult questions pertaining to what it means for all of us to participate in shaping a more just, shared future.

Section 1

Archives and Power: Engaging History Collaboratively

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091998-1

1 Student Activism and Institutional Change

A History of The Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program at Oregon State University

Kali Furman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091998-2

In 1990 a group of Oregon State University student organizers sent a letter to then university president John Byrne with a series of proposals for addressing the climate on campus for underrepresented students following a series of racist incidents on campus. Among the student proposals was an item insisting that “the University must develop and implement a series of courses dealing with cultural and ethnic diversity, as well as racism/discrimination and their origins” (Xing et al., 2007, p. 14). This letter started a chain of events that ultimately led to the creation of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination (DPD) Program. The creation of the DPD Program and its continued survival at the institution is due to the combined efforts of multiple actors including students, faculty and staff, the faculty senate, and DPD Program administrators. Each has parallel histories that intersected for the purpose of establishing and maintaining the DPD Program on campus. Through the use of university archival materials that span the past twenty-eight years, this chapter examines the relationship between student activism, faculty involvement, and institutional change in the history of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program at Oregon State University. Drawing on this as a foundation, I also reflect on my own experiences working with student activists and learning from a long history of student activism at Oregon State University about how we as teachers and practitioners can account for legacies of student activism and institutional memory.

The student organizers who addressed the university president in 1990 were not an anomaly in the history of the institution, but rather another generation in an ongoing legacy of student activists at Oregon State. This history is one I was largely unaware of when I came in 2013 to Oregon State University to pursue a master’s degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. When I arrived at Oregon State my knowledge about student activism was relatively limited. I was familiar with particularly famous historical forms of activism such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and had some experiences as an undergraduate student planning student actions. I spent my first three years on campus working for the Diversity and Cultural Engagement office and through my work with undergraduate students began to understand the university’s student activist culture that continues from this historical legacy.

In the eight years I’ve been at Oregon State there have been numerous incidents on campus that have spurred student action and, in turn, an institutional response. As these events have unfolded, I have had the opportunity to learn from students participating in these actions, as well as from university faculty and staff whose institutional memories include actions from previous student generations that have echoed the patterns happening in contemporary events. I experienced first-hand the tensions present in supporting student activism while serving as an employee of the institution and navigating bureaucratical structures while helping students to subvert them. These experiences have prompted my research interests in the ebbs and flows of institutional memory in relationship to student activism, faculty involvement, administrative responses, and institutional change more broadly. To examine how these patterns function in the history of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program, it is important to understand the history of racism in Oregon and Oregon State University’s student activist history.

Oregon's Racial History and Student Activism at Oregon State University

In the United States, the state of Oregon has a reputation for being a highly progressive liberal state but, in reality, the state operates from a place of white liberalism – meaning people who proport to be “liberal” but still uphold beliefs, practices and policies that continue to support oppression such as racism or classism. For example, in liberal communities such as Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene NIMBYism (an acronym for Not in My Back Yard) is commonplace. The majority of the population support policies that actively harm the large local houseless populations, such as opposing the creation of new low-income housing developments. As the writer, organizer, and spoken word artist Walidah Imarisha (2013) has shown through her critical work on the history of Black people in Oregon, the state was founded as “a white Utopian homeland” (p. 12). The state’s history of anti-Black racism predates its official statehood. In 1844 the provisional Oregon government passed Black exclusion laws, including a “Lash Law” that required all Black people residing in the state be whipped twice a year (Imarisha, 2013, p. 13). Oregon was the only state in the United Sates that was founded with an explicitly anti-Black clause in its constitution that forbade Black people from living in the state. Also included in the state constitution was a prohibition on Chinese Americans owning property, as well as filing or working on mining claims (Wilson, 2017). Oregon’s legacy of racism continues to this day and is evidenced in the gentrification of historically Black Portland communities like Albina – which were created by the use of redlining – and discrepancies in housing, income, education, and incarceration rates for Black Oregonians as compared to their white counterparts (Imarisha, 2013, p. 19). Oregon’s history of white supremacy and its ongoing legacy contributes to low numbers of people of color living in Oregon and attending Oregon State University. This also influences the ways in which racism manifests in the state and at the institution. A strong dynamic I observed while working in student affairs at Oregon State University is the divergent ways that white students, especially those from rural communities, and students of color experience our campus.

Oregon has a population-dense urban corridor ranging from the cities of Portland to Eugene; however, most of the state outside this corridor is composed of rural communities. I have often seen students from backgrounds not dissimilar from my own, small rural predominantly white working-class communities, express that Oregon State University is the most diverse place they’ve ever lived. In the same conversations students of color will state that Oregon and Oregon State University are the whitest places they’ve ever lived. These differences contribute to the divergent ways that students experience campus and how they navigate the institution and broader Corvallis community. Oregon State University is a predominantly white land-grant Research I institution located in Corvallis, Oregon. Founded in 1868, Oregon State University is located on the traditional territory of the Mary’s River or Ampinefu Band of the Kalapuya people who were forcibly removed to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations beginning in 1855. Oregon State has a heavy STEM focus and is one of only two universities in the United States to have Land-Grant, Sea-Grant, Space-Grant, and Sun-Grant designations. The university currently has an enrollment of 32,011 students and of those 25% are students of color¹ (About Oregon State University, n.d.). Oregon State University has been shaped by whiteness through the legacy of racism in the state of Oregon and through dominance of white students, staff, and faculty on campus throughout the institution’s history.

Oregon State University, like many institutions of higher education, has a long history of racism and, accompanying that, a rich history of student activism. Over the course of its history, Oregon State University has seen multiple marches, walkouts, and other forms of student protest in response to racism, homophobia, sexual violence, and other bias incidents. For example, in 1969, the Black Student Union walked out of the university after a racist incident with the head football coach, Dee Andros, when he threatened to expel a Black student athlete, Fred Milton, over his facial hair. In addition to the walk out the Black Student Union organized a sit-in, a class boycott, and started an underground newspaper, The Scab Sheet. These actions led the university to create the Educational Opportunities Program and in the years that followed two of Oregon State University’s seven cultural resource centers opened – the Native American Longhouse (1971) and the Centro Cultural Cesar Chavez (1972) (Oregon Multicultural Archives & Students of ALS 199, 2013). This pattern of student activism and institutional moves to create offices or programs to address issues around diversity and inequity continues today.

A contemporary example of this pattern occurred in 2015. That year students of color at the University of Missouri began a series of protests addressing the racist and homophobic campus climate. These protests sparked further student actions at multiple institutions across the United States, including Oregon State University. On November 11, 2015 three students, two of color and one white, and some of whom were queer, sent a letter to the senior administrators of Oregon State University calling out the administration for not doing enough to make OSU’s stated vision of creating a collaborative, inclusive and caring environment a reality for students of color. In their letter the students wrote,

Many students of color have experienced acts of racial violence on our campus that have gone unacknowledged and unaddressed. Furthermore, students of color are not experiencing the sense of security or the space to have their voice be heard on campus that they are entitled to.

(Armas et al., 2015)

The students demanded upper administration presence at a student of color speak out on the evening of Monday, November 16, 2015 at Gill Coliseum (the campus basketball arena). Over 500 people attended the Student of Color Speak Out event on campus and an estimated 3,000 watched the event from a live stream hosted by the university (Rimel, 2015). This event was attended by then university president Ed Ray, along with several other senior administrators. Eventually these actions led the university to create an Office of Institutional Diversity and hire a Chief Diversity Officer.

These events speak to the current state of student activism at Oregon State University and reflect the longer history of the institution. Such patterns of student demands and administrative responses are also visible in the history of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program on campus, which began in the early 1990s following a series of racist incidents and student organizing. In the history of these cycles of student actions and institutional responses at Oregon State University we can begin to see patterns emerge that demonstrate the importance of institutional memory and collaborations between students, staff, and faculty to create institutional change.

1990 Student Organizing

On October 20, 1990 an African American male student at Oregon State University was verbally assaulted with derogatory racist remarks from a group of white men in a moving van while in a restaurant parking lot in Corvallis. The student wrote down the vehicle license plate number and saw that the van had several decals associated with a campus fraternity. The student followed the van back to the fraternity house and left a written request for an apology. The next day he received a phone call from the van’s driver, an Oregon State Alumni and fraternity member. The driver told the student that he and the other men in the van, who were also alumni and one active OSU student, acted the way they did because they had been drinking (Jaramillo, 1991). After, word began to spread on campus about this incident and students began to organize. On October 23, three days after the incident, the Board of Directors of the Memorial Union held an emergency meeting. At that meeting the coordinator of the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center announced that the center would be closing indefinitely in protest of the “increased incidents of racial bigotry on campus and in the community, as well as the lack of responsiveness from university administration” (Jaramillo, 1991, p. 2). This closure and the ensuing student conversations about their experiences prompted a significant increase in accounts of racial harassment and discrimination that had gone unreported and further assertions that the university administration was unresponsive to incidents that were reported to the institution (Jaramillo, 1991).

Following this action by student leaders at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center, on October 24 Oregon State University President Byrne and other administrative leaders (the Vice Presidents of the institution and the Faculty Senate President) published an open letter stating that the university “will not tolerate cultural insensitivity or racial, ethnic, sexist, or homophobic harassment” and to reaffirm the university’s “commitment to increasing the ethnic/cultural diversity on campus and in the greater community” (Jaramillo, 1991, Appendix A). The letter was published in the student newspaper, The Barometer, and sent to all faculty, staff, student leaders, and the residence halls (Jaramillo, 1991). The Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center reopened on October 26 after students felt like the institution was beginning to move on these issues. During his annual Charter Day address on October 29 President Byrne announced he would form a commission to investigate the extent of racism on campus and the surrounding community and the committee would be charged with making recommendations to him based on the results of their investigation. Much of the history that is recounted in this section is made possible through the documentation of the President’s Commission on Racism and their official report, submitted to President Byrne in 1991.

Just one day after the President’s announcement that he would create the commission on racism, members of the student government, the Associated Students of OSU (ASOSU), lodged a complaint that other organization members told racist and sexist jo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Alma Clayton-Pedersen and Frank Hernandez
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: Archives and Power: Engaging History Collaboratively
• SECTION 2: Frameworks for Transformative Pedagogies
• SECTION 3: Destabilizing Dominant Narratives
• SECTION 4: Rethinking Approaches to Disciplinary Content
• Bios
• Index