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Week 2

"The Shape
​of Your Impact"
​

First
​Readings
Read “The Shape of My Impact” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” by Sylvia Wynter.  (Click on the brown, weblinked words to retrieve essays on this website).
In our first week, we will look closely at our three artifacts (the syllabus, the essay by Gumbs, and the essay by Wynter) and interrogate the university from these three documents.  Your first writing assignment is a letter to the professor that addresses the following (this is RR #1).  Here are your writing prompts:
  1. What questions/ concerns/ curiosities/ responses do you have about the syllabus?  You can answer this question as a graduate student and/or as a teacher who will be submitting syllabus docs at the end of the course yourself.  This prompt is really a request for you to look through the syllabus and determine for yourself if these are the things you want to think about and interrogate this semester.  Are you ready to talk about colleges today as “post-slavery universities”?  Are you ready to imagine and practice decolonial refusal?  The purpose of the class is not to convince you of these things.  Make sure that this is the class you want to take as opposed to simply following the suggestions of an advisor.
  2. How do you imagine anti-racist pedagogies in your life?  Why?  What do you want/ need from this class?
  3. What do we learn about the western academy from the perspectives of Gumbs and Wynter in the two assigned essays?
  4. Most of our discussions about schooling will center the university as opposed to K-12 spaces, where the majority of educational research targets. While we will remain connected to critical k-12 research, we must also account for the university as its own structure. How do the ideas of Gumbs and Wynter shape what we might imagine an anti-racist university to be and do?   
  5. What do YOU envision as the shape of YOUR IMPACT (at TCU, at universities where you will work, in your professional life, etc)?
 
Please submit this writing (and all writings for this class) in a google folder that you maintain throughout the semester that you give me access to.  Your writing is DUE before class.  You can expect comments by the end of the week.  We will follow our zoom plan for the course on this day. If we have two volunteers who are ready to present in this first class, we may start presentations today.