[Air-L] Lesson plans for teaching for a peaceful, diverse world that is safe for everyone

sky c skyc at riseup.net
Thu Nov 10 15:39:59 PST 2016


There are a couple of things I've been doing in my curriculum
development that might be applicable:

1) I run a unit that involves group work, and rather than taking it for
granted that students can just do it, I build in a bunch of
material/support that helps them to critically reflect on and develop
their collaborative processes. This ranges from the pre-existing
assessment that gets them to explore different tools that support online
collaboration, through to work on the importance of inclusiveness,
diversity, and emotional labour.

I think this is really important because many of the skills we need for
organising (including consensus decision-making, knowing how to listen,
building diverse coalitions, etc) aren't taught within the education
system, and are even actively discouraged in many ways.

2) As I'm sure many of you already do, I try to make sure that my
curriculum includes diverse perspectives, and pay attention to whether
readings lists are predominantly white men. I feel like it's incredibly
important that students from all backgrounds see themselves reflected in
the curriculum, and that people from privileged backgrounds both
acknowledge their own privilege and learn to look at the world from
other viewpoints.

Our university also has a curriculum development officer specifically
tasked with helping to put more Indigenous content into curriculum, and
I'll be working with him on that.

- sky.

On Thu, 2016-11-10 at 19:09 +0100, David Stodolsky wrote: 

> > On 10 Nov 2016, at 17.11, Joshua Braun <jabraun at journ.umass.edu> wrote:
> > 
> >> 
> >> Maybe this would also be a good time to bring discussions of
> >> pre-internet media and technology and their role in the years before
> >> WW2, or even earlier dangerous times, and to compare this to social
> >> media etc today?
> > 
> > I'd recommend J. Michael Sproul's article, "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm," which gives a great overview of the changing nature of mediated political speech in the pre-WWII era, as well as how critical and academic treatments of it evolved over time. 
> 
> This gives info on how much was invested in making sure the post-war world was not peaceful and safe:
> 
> http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/94BRgl2.html
> 
> Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960
> by Christopher Simpson
> Oxford University Press, 1994. 204 pp.
> 
> 
> For example, the US Air Force provided at least half of the budget of the Bureau of Social Science Research in the 1950s. Military contracts supported studies at this Bureau such as the vulnerabilities of Eastern European peoples for the purposes of psychological warfare and comparisons of the effectiveness of "drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive techniques during interrogation of prisoners."
> 
> 
> https://archive.org/details/For_The_Record_78_Interview_with_Christopher_Simpson
> 
> https://archive.org/details/For_The_Record_93_The_Science_of_Coercion_II_Interview_With_Christopher_Simpson
> 
> 
> dss
> 
> 
> David Stodolsky, PhD                   Institute for Social Informatics
> Tornskadestien 2, st. th., DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark
> dss at socialinformatics.org          Skype/Twitter: davidstodolsky
> 
> 
> 
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