African American Studies (AFAM), the School of Education (SOE) and the Race & Pedagogy Institute (RPI) at the University of Puget Sound have a shared history of collaboration over recent years. These collaborations took place in 2017 - 2021 under two projects aimed at developing new collaborative curricula between AFAM and SOE.
The Burlington Northern Company created an endowed fund at the University of Puget Sound to provide funding to assist curriculum development by faculty of the University. This fund recognizes that changes in disciplines and in student interests frequently necessitate development of new courses or new approaches to course materials, and new academic programs. These funds are available to all full-time faculty members with preferences given to proposals involving team-taught or other inter-disciplinary courses, courses that are likely to enhance particularly the effectiveness of the core curriculum, or other kinds of innovative courses or programs.
AFAM, SOE and RPI worked together from 2017 - 2021 on three separate projects that were titled:
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What is the arc of the work we have been doing and where might it take us?
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Historical collaborations and questions at the intersections of the Race and Pedagogy Institute (RPI), African American Studies (AFAM), RPI Community Partners Forum, the School of Education (SOE) and K-12 education.
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Curriculum development focused on developing an anti-racist pedagogical stance to build a practice of facing racism to move from reeling in fear to leaning into the ongoing work of equity.
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The mismatch between the teaching force and the students in K-12 education. The teaching force is predominantly white, middle class, monolingual females who were raised in white communities. By 2023 55% of K-12 students will be students of color and 45% will be white students. 13% of teachers in Washington state are teachers of color 87% are white.
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- The African American Studies program launched its major in the fall of 2016 at the time there were four registered majors and 17 minors. Alongside the growth of the number of students in the major and minor is the increase of student interest in the African American Studies course offerings and an increased interest from faculty members in other departments and programs seeking to collaborate on course development and other curriculum development projects.
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As the School of Education explores a path for the future we in African American Studies have engaged with the new leadership in early discussions about possible connections and collaborations between our two programs. We are proposing to host a faculty retreat during the summer months. The retreat will be dedicated to reviewing and refining our curriculum for the major and the minor and we will work with faculty in the School of Education to explore the prospects of curriculum and programmatic collaborations that may be mutually beneficial to both entities as well as the Puget Sound as a whole. It is important to note that discussions about collaborations between these two programs build on the ongoing efforts of the Race and Pedagogy Institute to link higher education to K-12 education. One specific element of our efforts has included collaborations with the School of Education in our conferences. This emerging exploration between AFAM and the School of Education is a continuation of this effort with the prospect that we might develop creative and collaborative curriculum programing as a way to develop a pipeline to graduate preparation for Puget Sound undergraduates interested in becoming teachers and to ground the School of Education’s teacher education program in the specific context of Tacoma’s urban education environment.