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Integrating the Theme of Social Justice into Comp 1302 Literary Analysis
Hours: 2
If you’re looking at your syllabus for Comp 1302 and thinking about making
some adjustments, this workshop is designed to offer you an approach for choosing and analyzing stories. This approach, exploring the theme of social justice in short stories, is based on two curriculum models. The first is from Dr. Elizabeth Kirkland, Dawson College, whose social science courses explore the settler-colonial paradigm that she sees permeating many aspects of our culture. By settler-colonial settings, she is referring not only to European exploitation of the First Nations peoples on this continent, but also to entitlement, white privilege, and manifest destiny. The other is the department wide, broad-based, multi-course initiative, Literature and Social Justice (LSJ) at Lehigh University. Both explore the dynamics of domination, exploitation, and privilege manifested in internalized identity and in person/ person, person/ society, person/government relationships. Both curricula suggest Essential Questions for discovering “deep structures of domination, inequality, and injustice” (Moglen, Keetley and Crassons).
Whether you use this approach for analysis for one story or as a unifying theme for the semester, the workshop will give you (1) some theoretical background, (2) some applications to several stories from our anthologies, and (3) example questions to guide students’ analysis of the theme of social justice. The most powerful benefits of this workshop will come from the opportunity to discuss stories and instructional strategies with creative and insightful colleagues. |
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