Women’s Activism and Social Change in the Twentieth
Century U.S.: A Service Learning Course in Conjunction with Lansing State
Residential Center
History/AMST/FGSS 4141 Fall 2009
Meets Mondays from 2:30-4:25 in Goldwin Smith Hall Room 122 and
Thursdays from 3-4:30 at Lansing State Residential Center, 270 Auburn Road (Rt.
34), Lansing NY 14882, with Lansing Volunteer Coordinator Dee Cooper. Plan to leave campus at 2:30 and return by 5
pm. You do not need to have a car or to
drive to take this course. We will work
out a carpool for travel from campus to Lansing State and drivers will be
reimbursed for travel expenses.
Professor Tamar Carroll, History Department
twc57@cornell.edu, 363 McGraw Hall,
Office Hours: Mondays 4:30-6 and by
appointment
Email is the best way to get in touch with me and I will generally respond to
student emails within 24 hours.
Service Learning Course Assistant Davina Chen
dsc99@cornell.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Students are encouraged to meet during office hours or by appointment with
either Professor Carroll or with Davina to discuss any aspect of this
course.
Course description: This is a
service-learning course in which we will examine women’s leadership in
movements for social change, and work together with young women imprisoned at
Lansing State Residential Center to produce and publish an illustrated book
about their experiences of incarceration.
Through readings, reflective and expressive writing, discussion, and
group interaction, we will gain a better understanding of how historical
knowledge, teaching and learning, and creative production facilitate critical
consciousness, empowerment, and social change.
The process of working collectively to produce the book is ultimately
more significant than the end product; however, the book will be distributed as
widely as possible in order to raise awareness of the multiple challenges
facing imprisoned youth. This project is
inspired in part by writer Dave Egger’s non-profit 826 writing and tutoring
centers, and we share their goal of “strengthening each student’s power
to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her
individual voice.” You can read more
about 826 at their website, http://www.826chi.org/
Cornell students
enrolled in this course will work in groups of 3-4 to plan activities for our
meetings with the residents at Lansing State.
These activities should be fun as well as educational, and participation
in them should promote relationship building between Lansing residents and
Cornell students. The cumulative
writings and illustrations created during these activity sessions will form the
basis of our book. Davina and I are
available for consultation in planning these workshops. This is an opportunity for you to enhance
your creativity, resourcefulness, leadership, and problem solving skills. As a group, we will plan and coordinate the
assembly of the final version of the book, which we will have printed by Blurb
for distribution to all participants by the second week in Dec. You may wish to familiarize yourself with the
templates used for uploading PDFs at http://www.blurb.com/make/books
Materials: Thanks to the support of the Cornell Public
Service Center, we have a modest budget for material purchases, including
paper, pens, markers, art materials, books, and anything else needed. I will provide each group of students with a
copy of Don’t Forget to Write: 54
Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons for Students 6-18 written by the
Workshop Teachers of 826 Valencia and 826 New York City, which offers a great
starting-off point for designing fun, creative, and expressive writing
projects. Please inform me as early as
possible of any additional materials needed for your group’s projects at
Lansing. It is also possible for us to
play music or to show films during our sessions at Lansing, should you so desire.
Course readings and
assignments: There are two assigned
books: Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed and Gerda Lerner’s Fireweed:
A Political Autobiography. These
books are available for purchase in the Cornell Bookstore; a copy of each has also
been placed on reserve in Olin Library.
Additional readings are listed on the syllabus and are available through
the internet or will be posted on our course Blackboard site. Our readings cover three main topics: 1) the
current and historical conditions of imprisonment of young women; 2) methods of
feminist pedagogy and the relationship between group education and social
movements; and 3) women’s history and autobiographical writing as empowering
forms of knowledge. Because of the time
dedicated to the service component of this course, readings are limited in
length and are intended to take approximately 2 hours per week on average to
complete. However, I am happy to suggest
additional optional readings should you wish to pursue a topic in greater depth,
or to distribute additional brief readings to the class as a whole, should you
find something important that you wish to add to our class materials. This reading schedule is meant to be a
helpful and flexible starting point; if we find that it is not meeting our
collective needs as a group doing a service learning project, we can modify
it.
Students must complete
a weekly reflection paper, in which they connect and process their thoughts on
assigned readings, class discussion, and interactions at Lansing. Weekly reflection papers should be
approximately 1.5 to 2 pages typed double-spaced, and they will be collected
for grading at the end of class each Monday.
Students must also
complete a group-based final presentation analyzing and evaluating their
experiences over the semester. These
presentations, which will be given in class on December 3, should be about 20
minutes long and include visual aids.
Please let me know about any special equipment needs at least two weeks
prior to the presentations.
Attendance both on
campus and at Lansing State is mandatory, and missing more than one meeting
will lower your grade, unless you have received prior permission from me and/or
you are sick or have a personal emergency.
If you have the flu or another communicable illness, please stay home
and inform me via email.
Final grades will be
based on participation in class and at Lansing (50 percent), your journal
entries (25 percent), and your final group presentation (25 percent).
A note on visiting
Lansing: Please avoid wearing clothing
with profanities, sexual innuendos, etc., on it, because you will be denied
entry to the facility. You cannot bring
cell phones into the facility, and should leave them along with any valuables,
including your wallets, either at home or in a locked car in the parking
lot. Do not give out personal
information about yourself, including your phone number, address, or email
address, to any inmate. The Lansing
State staff retains the right to deny us entry into the facility should we
violate these guidelines, as well as more generally, at their discretion.
Schedule and Assignments:
***Please note that readings
are due on the day they are listed on the syllabus for discussion. Please bring copies of the completed readings
and notes on them with you to class to aid in discussion.
***This schedule is subject to change at the instructor’s discretion in order
to maximize student learning and to accommodate the needs of staff at Lansing
State. Please check our course Blackboard
site regularly for announcements.
Monday, Aug. 31 Introductions;
Syllabus and Goals; Lecture on Incarceration in the U.S.
Handout: Nicholas Confessore, “4 Youth
Prisons in New York Used Excessive Force,” New
York Times, Aug. 25, 2009, p. A1.
Wednesday, Sept. 2 One-time mandatory
training from 5-6:30 pm [campus location TBA]:
Tutoring 101: How People Learn
Monday, Sept. 7 Current Conditions for Incarcerated Girls
Human Rights Watch, “Custody and Control:
Conditions of Confinement in New York’s Juvenile Prisons for Girls,”
Sept. 24, 2006, available on-line at:
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2006/09/24/custody-and-control
and
Laurie Schaffner, “Girl-On-Girl Violence Hearing Testimony,” online at the
Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance website http://www.womenandprison.org/violence/schaffner-violence.html
Note that this website is a good general resource on women and prisons; take
some time to check it out thoroughly this week or next week.
planning and logistics for Thursday’s training at Lansing state: organize car
pools
Thursday, Sept.
10 Learning Together: A Training on
Working With Incarcerated Girls with Dee Cooper, Volunteer Coordinator, Lansing
State Residential Center
Monday, Sept. 14: Education
as Empowerment
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Forward, Preface and Chapters 1 and 2, pp. 29-86. Planning for introductory
meeting with residents on Thursday; groups sign up for their session dates at
Lansing.
Thursday, Sept. 17 Getting to Know Each Other: First Visit to
Lansing State
Monday, Sept. 21 Social Movements and Women’s Leadership
Linda Gordon, “Social Movements, Leadership, and Democracy: Toward More Utopian
Mistakes,” Journal of Women’s History 14:2
(Summer 2002), pp. 102- 117, available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v014/14.2gordon.html
and Benita Roth, Introduction to and Definitions, “What Are Social Movements
and What Is Gendered About Women's Participation in Social Movements?: A
Sociological Perspective,” available at http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/socm/intro.htm (The related historical documents are
optional additional readings).
Thursday, Sept. 24 Lansing State
Monday, Sept. 28 Intersectionality, Violence, The Criminal
Justice System, and Activism
Ann Cammett, “Queer Lockdown: Coming to Terms with the Ongoing Criminalization
of LGBT Communities,” The Scholar and
Feminist Online (7:3, Summer 2009), available at
http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/sexecon/cammett_01.htm
Jaye Cee Whitehead, “Feminist Prison Activism: An Assessment of Empowerment,” Feminist Theory (8:3, 2007), pp.
299-314, available at http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/8/3/299
In-class Film showing: Sista to Sista,
“No More Violence Against Our Sistas,” more information available at http://www.sistaiisista.org/index.html
Thursday, Oct. 1 Lansing State
Monday, Oct. 5 The
Commodification of Women’s Sexuality, Feminist Art, and Social Change
Susan Lustig and Kathryn Kish Sklar, “How and Why Did the Guerrilla Girls Alter
the Art World Establishment in New York City, 1985-1995?” in Women and Social Movement in the United
States, 1600-2000 (Vol.6: 2002), accessible though the library website or
our Blackboard site; read introduction and study the documents.
Laurie Schaffner, “Empty Families, Sexuality, and Trouble,” in Girls in Trouble With the Law (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), pp. 79-113.
Thursday, Oct. 8 Lansing State
Monday, Oct.
12: No class Fall Study Break
Thursday, Oct. 15 Lansing State
Monday, Oct. 19 Families and Communities in an era of racialized
mass incarceration
Dorothy Roberts, “The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African
American Communities,” Stanford Law
Review (56:5,, 2004), pp. 1271-1304.
Lora Bex Lempert, Suzanne Bergeron, and Maureen Linker, “Negotiating the
Politics of Space: Teaching Women’s Studies in a Women’s Prison,” available
online at http://filmfixationvideovixan.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/nego-womens-studies.pdf
Thursday, Oct. 22 Lansing State
Monday, Oct. 26 Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, Part I, pp. 1-147.
Thursday, Oct. 29 Lansing State
Monday, Nov. 2 Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, Part I1, pp. 151-216 and
following photographs.
Thursday, Nov. 5 Lansing State
Monday, Nov. 9 Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, Part III, pp. 219-274.
Thursday, Nov. 12 Lansing State
Monday, Nov. 16
Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political
Autobiography, Part IV, 277-373.
Thursday, Nov.
19 Lansing State: Last day to work on
book project with residents
Monday, Nov. 23 Freire, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, Chapters 3 and 4, pp. 87-183.
Thursday, Nov.
26 No meeting Thanksgiving Break
Monday Dec. 3 Group Presentations
Final Celebration: To be held at Lansing in early December; date
and time to be determined; books distributed