Thinking in Public

Public Scholarship from UT Austin

ARCHIVE: Featured Projects

The Institute for Community, University, and School Partnerships

Do academics bear a social responsibility? How can academic research promote positive change and advance social justice? What are the implications of community engagement for scholarship? These questions have shaped the life’s work of Kevin Michael Foster, an anthropologist of education and a faculty member at the Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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2016-17 COBRA and VOICES facilitators

As a doctoral student at UT in the late-1990s, Foster aimed to learn more about the challenges that affect the academic achievement of low-income students of color in the United States: indecent housing, lack of health care, inadequate nutrition, financial insecurity- to draft policies to fix them. He soon discovered that there was no “silver bullet” solution for redressing racial and class disparities in school performance. Rather, Foster came to understand that education policy must reflect what he calls “contextually grounded collaborative work” involving researchers, teachers, families, and students themselves. In other words, researchers must arrive at solutions based upon their everyday encounters with the individuals and communities they study.

In 2006, Foster founded the Institute for Community, University, and School Partnerships (ICUSP). ICUSP is an independent organization that brings together resources from local communities, universities, and schools to create programs that promote academic achievement, well being, and eventual life and career success of predominately African American and Latino students in underserved neighborhoods in Austin and Houston. ICUSP embraced the notion that education policy must take into account the everyday needs and desires of local students and communities. “I learned early on that being a good researcher meant building relationships with students, parents, and teachers in Austin,” Foster recalled. “It’s only through listening that we gain everyday insights that are critical for creating more impactful research.” By engaging Austin-area activists and teachers, Foster gained access to their everyday experiences that led him to ask better questions and produce better scholarship.

ICUSP’s first initiative was COBRA, the Community of Brothers in Revolutionary Alliance, which was founded with local school principal Mr. Patrick Patterson on the campus of LBJ High School in Austin. COBRA serves as a support group for male high school students of color. Spearheaded by students themselves, COBRA has improved academic achievement, instilled leadership skills, promoted self-confidence, and counseled prospective first-generation college students about the university admissions process and the challenges campus life. The organization was so popular that a group of female students approached Dr. Foster with a desire to create a program of their own. Each February, COBRA and VOICES students attend classes at the University of Texas and college campuses throughout the state to learn about the exciting opportunities made possible by a four-year university education. Approximately 90% of all COBRA and VOICES graduates will attend college next fall.

The close collaboration between university faculty, high school teachers, administrators, and students between high school and graduate levels sets ICUSP apart from other organizations. UT-Austin students work in all phases of ICUSP programming, playing key roles as facilitators in the COBRA and VOICES initiatives. Students have also developed content and acted as co-producers of BlackademicsTV, a recent initiative that arose out of a desire to use mass media to more broadly connect academics and their insights with communities.

Edward Shore

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Keep up with ICUSP and BlackademicsTV on these websites.

ICUSP Twitter: https://twitter.com/icusp_programs
ICUSP Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icusp?fref=ts
ICUSP Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/icusp_programs/

Blackademics Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlackademicsTv
Blackademics Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlackademicsTelevision
Blackademics Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackademics_tv/

Corrupt The Youth

By Briana Toole 

The aim of Corrupt the Youth is to attract students from more diverse backgrounds to philosophy. Corrupt the Youth is a philosophy outreach program that brings philosophy to high school students attending under-resourced schools. In moving philosophy into the realm of the familiar, we hope to increase the number of students of color who see philosophy as a viable option for study.

By the time many students get to college, they think it’s already too late for them to begin studying philosophy. Students from underprivileged and impoverished backgrounds often enter college intending to study the familiar – to become doctors, lawyers, or engineers. These professions are all over our television screens. The philosopher is not. While students from more privileged backgrounds may have encountered philosophy during their high-school careers, the same is not true for students from underprivileged backgrounds, many of whom are people of color. I suspect that students who have already been introduced to philosophy are more likely to consider studying philosophy when they enter the university. Conversely, because people of color are less likely to have been exposed to philosophy, they may be less likely to seriously consider philosophy as a field of study. 

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Corrupt the Youth takes its name from the Greek philosopher Socrates, who was sentenced to death for allegedly ‘corrupting’ the youth. Socrates encouraged the Greek youth to question, and if necessary, oppose, the political and moral conventions of their society. The goal of the Corrupt the Youth philosophy outreach program is to continue that project. 

Corrupt the Youth was founded at the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2016, and works with juniors at Eastside Memorial High. Typically, two or three mentors (undergraduate or graduate students in philosophy, or philosophy professors) facilitate a class. We open the day’s lesson by introducing a key question. This question introduces the central topic for the day’s class. Students then focus on a short, manageable philosophy text. Students might then participate in a short activity or discussion to further their engagement with and deepen their understanding of the text. Classes conclude by connecting the key question and philosophical text to a broader question or issue. 

For instance, a sample class might begin by asking the following key question: Are we good people when no one is watching? This is the question Socrates poses in “The Ring of Gyges.” In this dialogue, which the students read, Socrates suggests that most people would not behave morally without the fear of being caught and punished. We then ask students to apply this lesson to a contemporary issue: police corruption. Using the key question and the text as a guide, we encourage students to respond to the question: should police offices be required to wear body cameras?

In introducing students to these important philosophical topics, our broad goal is to provide students with a framework through which to understand, critically evaluate, and address some of the unique issues that we face today (like police brutality, dog-whistle politics, and xenophobia, to name a few). We also want to encourage students to critically reflect on their beliefs, values, and commitments. In this way, we hope to help students appreciate the practical value of philosophy.

Corrupt the Youth is seeking to expand to other universities, and is also trying to acquire funding to create a weeklong summer camp in philosophy for Texas high school students. You can learn more at CorruptTheYouth.org.

 

Danteworlds: Digital Humanities as Public Scholarship

By Guy Raffa 

Taking a new approach to guiding students, teachers, researchers, and general readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy, we built Danteworlds with integrated, multimedia content that allows users to proceed geographically as well as textually, not only canto by canto but also—as Dante and his guides do—region by region through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. I wrote original scholarly commentary, based on a close examination of the poet’s biblical, classical, and medieval sources, to help locate the characters and creatures Dante encounters in his journey and assist in decoding the poem’s vast array of allusions to religion, philosophy, history, politics, and other works of literature. I completed the Danteworlds website, with artwork by Suloni Robertson and technical support from Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, in 2005, and the Danteworlds reader’s guides I wrote were published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007 (Inferno) and 2009 (Complete Danteworlds).

Danteworlds, courtesy of Guy Raffa.
Danteworlds, courtesy of Guy Raffa.

Consistent with the Divine Comedy‘s own web-like design—the way in which related passages point forward and backward to one another—Danteworlds takes advantage of web technology by including links within the entries that encourage users to connect episodes and trace the development of important themes in the poem. In addition to the entries, each region features an extensive gallery of images (the site contains over 400), audio recordings of selected verses (in the original Italian), and a series of study questions designed to aid individual study and foster group or class discussion. A winner of multiple awards for innovative instructional technology, Danteworlds was selected by the NEH as “one of the best online resources for education in the humanities.” Choice Reviews calls the website “an invaluable resource for specialists and novices alike,” adding that Danteworlds is “the sort of multimedia experience that those in the digital humanities strive for.”

Featured in literary blogs of the New Yorker and Los Angeles Times—and used by Electronic Arts to introduce players of their Inferno videogame to Dante’s poem—Danteworlds models how work in digital humanities also serves the public. While the project targets academic users and produces verifiable improvement in student performance, an analysis of web traffic and social media suggests a healthy amount of extracurricular interest: Danteworlds welcomed between 765,000 and 1 million visitors each year from 2009 to 2013, and has been “liked” by over 75,000 subscribers to StumbleUpon, the popular web-sharing site. Danteworlds brought my scholarship to the attention of reporters (who interviewed me for articles in Slate and The Atlantic), and this public engagement inspired me to write Dante-related pieces on a wide range of topics—from Google, Mad Men, and contemporary culture to marriage equality and medieval warfare—for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Life & Letters, Signature Course Stories, PopMatters, and Military History Quarterly. As seen in this public lecture, I have built on the success of Danteworlds to show how digital scholarship advances the reciprocity of university research and teaching while making this work available for the benefit of society at large.

The Black Male Education Research Collection

By Edward Shore

African American males contend with a number of institutional barriers to success in school. These challenges include disproportionate dropout rates, high rates of expulsion and suspension, and limited access to special education programs. African American women encounter similar obstacles. Yet a recent Journal of Blacks in Higher Education study revealed a worsening gender gap in academic achievement among African American young people. In 2014, women accounted for nearly two-thirds of all African American bachelor degree holders. Black women were also seventy per-cent more likely to hold a masters’ degree and sixty per-cent more likely to earn a PhD. The black male education crisis has reached a tipping point. Unfortunately, academic research on the subject has proven difficult to locate online.

This fall, University of Texas College of Education professors Louis Harrison and Anthony Brown launched a new website, the Black Male Education Research Collection (BMERC). Their database offers an accessible, web-based repository providing policymakers, researchers, teachers, parents, and mentors with a comprehensive collection of scholarly articles from peer-reviewed journals, dissertations, and magazine articles that focus on African American males in higher education. UT graduate students Jessica Leitner and Alvin Logan compiled and synthesized new research on a range of topics, including African American males and psychological health, literacy, athletics, mathematics, and sex education. According to Dr. Brown and Dr. Harrison, the primary goal of the Black Male Education Research Collection is to challenge the ideology of meritocracy in the U.S. education system. They contend that the notion “if you work hard, you will succeed” has failed to take into account the stark socio-economic inequalities that have historically inhibited academic performance among poor and nonwhite students throughout the United States.

For instance, BMERC has highlighted new research by David Kirkland examining the critical role played by African American children’s literature in boosting the reading engagement of African American boys. Unfortunately, Kirkland discovered that this body of literature remains glaringly absent and underutilized in schools with sizable populations of black and nonwhite students. BMERC has also publicized a recent study authored by D.Y. Moore and J.L. Scott analyzing the stark under-representation of African Americans in gifted education programs, a disparity resulting, in part, from school administrators’ persistent failure to recruit black students.

By highlighting these and nearly one thousand additional articles about African Americans and performance in school, UT professors Louis Harrison and Anthony Brown have influenced a broader discussion about race and education reform. BMERC is supported by several offices at the University of Texas, including the College of Education’s Department on Curriculum Instruction, the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, and the African American Male Research Initiative (AAMRI). AAMRI, led by Dr. Gregory Vincent, the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, and featuring history professor Leonard Moore and recent history Ph.D graduate Cameron McCoy, has worked tirelessly to increase the four-year graduation rate for African American males at the University of Texas and to increase the number of black males attending four-year colleges and universities across the state. The Black Male Education Research Collection promises to advance these efforts by synthesizing and compiling academic research on African American education in one accessible and easy-to-use online database.

Refusing to Forget

By Edward Shore

White terror and racial strife inflamed the Texas-Mexico border at the turn of the twentieth century. Historians estimate that police officers, Texas Rangers, vigilante groups, and ordinary civilians alike massacred between several hundred and five-thousand people of Mexican descent residing in the southern Texas borderlands between 1910 and 1920. The victims included men and women, young people and the elderly, long-time residents of Texas and newly-arrived immigrants. Far from condemning the killings, many politicians and authorities endorsed ethnic cleansing. One Texas newspaper called for the “elimination” of a “serious population surplus.” Others advocated for the mass re-location of people of Mexican descent to concentration camps. The rash of racial violence in the borderlands coincided with the Mexican Revolution, a bloody, decade-long conflict that claimed the lives of nearly one in ten Mexican citizens. One million Mexicans arrived in the United States as refugees during this period. A century later, the anti-Mexican pogroms on the Texas-Mexico border remained largely overlooked in official remembering of racial violence and white terror in the age of Jim Crow and the rise of Klan.

Robert Runyon photograph of a south Texas field. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Robert Runyon photograph of a south Texas field. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

That is, until now. In 2013, John Morán-González, professor of English at the University of Texas-Austin, together with colleagues Trinidad Gonzáles (South Texas College), Sonia Hernández (Texas A&M), Benjamin Johnson (Loyola University-Chicago), and Monica Muñoz (Brown University), launched Refusing to Forget. A collaborative, multi-disciplinary public history project that critically examines the deadly state violence targeting Texas Mexicans in the U.S. Mexico borderlands during the decade 1910-1920, Refusing to Forget has memorialized the victims while pressing educators, state officials, and the public to consider the legacy of state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the state of Texas. Through public exhibits, the placement of historical markers, and the fostering of community dialogues, Refusing to Forget underscores the necessity of understanding how past events continue to shape social relationships between Mexican-American communities and state institutions, especially law enforcement.

Dr. Morán González and his team have counted on the contributions of the public to share this painful chapter in Texas history. For instance, Ernesto “Buddy” and Benita Albarado of Uvalde, dedicated years of research and their own resources to preserve historical memory of the Porvenir Massacre of 1918 in Presidio County, west Texas. On January 27, 1918, a force of Texas Rangers arrested and summarily executed fifteen Texas Mexicans in retaliation for a series of raids committed by suspected followers of Pancho Villa in the area. The efforts of the Albarado family and other public-minded researchers led to the unveiling of a 2016 special exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum dedicated to the Porvernir Massacre and racial violence in the borderlands during the early twentieth century. Refusing to Forget plans to launch an online exhibit, curate a traveling museum exhibit, and design curriculum materials for public school teachers to preserve the memory of victims and to lend critical historical context to contemporary debates about immigration reform, civil rights, and policing.