“Social Justice belongs to all of us,” said Laura Katz. In 2008, the Social Justice Curricular Design Group proposed a potential new minor focused on social justice. Laura Katz, co-chair of SJCDG, presented the group’s proposal of a new minor in social justice this semester with the hopes that it become an interdepartmental minor.
Created in the fall of 2017, The Social justice Curricular Design Group was a community that aimed to highlight the importance of social justice and its inclusion across the Smith curriculum. Efforts were made by the attendance of around 10-25 students (including co-chair Rose Silverman’18) and faculty co-chairs, Mehammed Mack (French and Study of Women and Gender) and Laura Katz (Biology and Study of Women and Gender) that focused on topics such as defining “social justice”, acknowledging social justice programs at other institutions for potential studies, and other proposals that can create more opportunities for students to engage with social justice in the curriculum.
Since the Fall of 2018, the potential new minor has been discussed as a way for social justice to be included in the curriculum and for students to be more engaged in discussions of social justice and change. This minor might be called, “Social Justice, Equity and Inclusion” or “Social Justice and Human Rights” but the exact name is still to be determined. Being an interdepartmental minor would mean that students interested in studying the new minor would have to take one course in every division in order to complete the minor. This idea is modeled by the Environmental Science & Policy major where the individual student would select 6 courses to cover the breadth of the topic, which the board of the minor would then review.
The board would possibly consist of two faculty members from each division, and the minor would include courses on diverse topics (e.g. in international, domestic, and issues about race and gender). However, the only course that all students interested would have to take would be a gateway course that might be similar to the “Thinking Through Race,” course that will be taught by Floyd Cheung next semester.
The vision for this new fall semester course would be, according to Laura Katz, “A really cool first semester lecture series that really links to some outside lecturers [and] that’s co-taught where students get a grade for the work. And that class might be co-taught by faculty on the committee and, perhaps also, a faculty from the School of Social work.”
As a summation of their work and study in this minor, students would have to complete a capstone that would either be a special studies or a focus on one of the concentrations offered through the Jandon Center. Of those concentrations exists The Community Engagement & Social Change Concentration that students can look into for opportunities involving hands-on experience in the community.
There is also talk about a new Human Rights concentration run by the Jandon Center that is being pushed by Alice Herst, a government professor at Smith, who has also been involved in the efforts of SJCDG.
Though Erica Tibbetts (Exercise and Sports Studies), Shannon Audley (Education) and Lily Gurton-Wachter (English) have expressed interest in the mission of SJCDG, the minor currently lacks a board of faculty to put the proposal together. Even if enough faculty members agree to be on the board, it may take up to a year and a half for the minor to become available to students as a proposal must be reviewed and accepted by the college’s Committee on Academic Priorities.
This potential latency, especially with students wanting more social justice in the classroom, could create an alternative of a “social justice requirement” instead, similar to Smith’s writing intensive requirement. This alternative is dependent on what the students want and, perhaps, its attainability.
Though this alternative is something Laura Katz is on board with, she is also concerned that “taking one course and being like ‘check! I’ve done my Social Justice Equity and Inclusion work’ is less meaningful than actually engaging reflectively into that work, so a minor could, if we could get it off the ground, might be a better outcome than a requirement”.
In the meantime, students will have to wait, perhaps, a few more years before a social justice minor can be offered into the curriculum.
