Opening Up to Hard History: Activating Anti-Racism in an Immersive Ed.D. Cohort Experience at Heritage Sites in Montgomery, Alabama

Authors

  • Theresa G. Coble University of Missouri - St. Louis
  • Corinne Wohlford Mason Fontbonne University
  • Lisa Overholser University of Missouri Extension
  • William W. Gwaltney National Park Service (Retired)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/ie.2020.132

Keywords:

memorials, affect, contested space, high-impact practices, activism, equal justice initiative

Abstract

The Ed.D. program in Heritage Leadership for Sustainability, Social Justice, and Participatory Culture at the University of Missouri—St. Louis helps students cultivate the mindsets and skill sets required to sustain, pluralize, and enliven heritage in the public sphere. Although the program primarily meets synchronously online, the January 2020 “Wintercession” field trip to heritage sites in Montgomery, Alabama, provided an opportunity for face-to-face interactions, deep conversation, and reflection. Curricular, conversational, and collaborative inquiry deepened awareness and activated activism toward issues of racial justice. The use of high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008) allowed the cohort and faculty mentors to delve further into heritage leadership themes, including: confronting difficult emotions, recognizing sanctified space, facilitating group bonding and trust building, identifying models for activism, and moving forward in activism. We argue that the emergence of these themes demonstrates the value of immersing students and faculty in a shared, high-impact experience that focused on awareness, remembering, and wondering—the process of imagining the not yet (Keenan-Lechel et al., 2019)—as a means to “activate activism” in a cohort-based Ed.D. program.

Author Biography

Theresa G. Coble, University of Missouri - St. Louis

Theresa G. Coble, Ph.D.

(she, her, hers)

E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Experiential and Family Education

Community Partner: Forest Park Forever

College of Education

University of Missouri - St. Louis
Email: coblet@umsl.edu

Cell: 817-235-7842

References

Alderman, D. H., Brasher, J. P., & Dwyer III, O. J. (2020). Memorials and monuments. Pp. 39-47. in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 9.

Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Askins, K. & Swanson, K. (2019). Holding onto emotions: A call to action in academia. Emotion, Space and Society, 33, 100617.

Bales, K. (2016). Blood and earth: Modern slavery, ecocide, and the secret to saving the world. New York: Spiegal & Grau.

Battiste, M., Anuik, J. & Gillies, C. (2009, May). Nourishing the learning spirit: Emerging promising practices for teaching and lifelong learning. Presentation for the Canadian Society for the Study of Education 2009 Conference: Learning Spaces, Places and Connections. Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.

Burbules, N. C. (2016). Being critical about being critical. A response to “Toward a transformative criticality for democratic citizenship education.” Democracy & Education, 24(2), Article 7.

Caruthers, L. (2007). The soil of silence: Deconstructing socio-cultural and historical processes that have influenced schooling for First Nations People and African Americans. American Educational History Journal, 34(2), 303-313.

Cook, M. R. (2018). Textual politics of Alabama’s historical markers: Slavery, emancipation, and civil rights. Pp. 1-31 in S. D. Brunn et al. (Eds.), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer International Publishing.

Garmston, R. J. & Wellman, B. M. (2013). Developing collaborative norms. Pp. 27-44 in The adaptive school: A sourcebook for developing collaborative groups. Norwood, MA: Christopher Gordon Publishers.

Hawken, P. (Ed.) (2017). Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. New York: Penguin Books.

Izard, C. E. (2010). The many meanings/aspects of emotion: Definition, functions, activation, and regulation. Emotion Review, 2, 363.

Kay, M. R. (2018). Not light, but fire: How to lead meaningful race conversations in the classroom. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Keenan-Lechel, S. F., Henriksen, D. & the Deep-Play Research Group. (2019). Creativity as perspective taking: An interview with Dr. Vlad Glăveanu. Tech Trends, 63, 652-658.

Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. New York: One World.

Kuh, G. D. (2008). Why integration and engagement are essential to effective educational practice in the twenty-first century. Peer Review, 10(4), 27-28.

Liu, E. (2017). You’re more powerful than you think: A citizen’s guide to making change happen. New York: PublicAffairs.

Munro, E. (2014). Doing emotion work in museums: Reconceptualizing the role of community engagement practitioners. Museum & Society, 12(1), 44-60.

Oberpfalzerová, H., Ullrich, J., & Jeřábek, H. (2019). Unofficial storytelling as middle ground between transitional truth-telling and forgetting: A new approach to dealing with the past in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 13, 1-20.

Palmer, P. J. (2011). Healing the heart of democracy: The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rothstein, R. (2014, Oct). The making of Ferguson: Public policies at the root of its troubles. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. (Available online: https://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/).

Sibbett, L. A. (2016). Toward a transformative criticality for democratic citizenship education. Democracy & Education, 24(2), Article 1.

Smith, L., Kashubeck-West, S., Payton, G., & Adams, E. (2017). White professors teaching about racism: Challenges and rewards. The Counseling Psychologist, 45(5), 651-668.

Wahl, R. (2019). Learning in democracy: Deliberation and activism as forms of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38, 517-536.

Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The uninhabitable earth: Life after warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books.

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2020-07-17

How to Cite

Coble, T. G., Mason, C. W., Overholser, L., & Gwaltney, W. W. (2020). Opening Up to Hard History: Activating Anti-Racism in an Immersive Ed.D. Cohort Experience at Heritage Sites in Montgomery, Alabama. Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice, 5(2), 26–32. https://doi.org/10.5195/ie.2020.132

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 2 (2020): Activating Activism: Promoting Activism within EdD Programs

Section

Themed - Activism

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.