In our call for submissions, we asked educators from across the disciplines to share teaching materials that forward social justice pedagogies. While our understanding of social justice is grounded in the field of Technical and Professional Communication’s ongoing social justice turn toward actionable and coalitional justice, we invited contributors to briefly discuss how their course materials enact socially just pedagogies as they understand them across contexts such as writing studies, composition, writing center studies, rhetoric writ large, and still others. Their unique course syllabi and activities join a chorus of existing materials within both the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) Syllabus Repository and Teaching and Learning Materials. These digital spaces house peer-contributed collections of open-source pedagogical resources. By making the resources our contributors shared with us on the DRC website, our aim is to provide alternative pathways for scholars to share and take up pedagogical strategies that actively challenge systemic inequities.
As organizers of this social justice pedagogies series, we were delighted by the range of submissions and creative social justice interventions of our submitters. From syllabi about equity-focused communication by Joanna Wolfe to two distinct carceral rhetoric courses by Kirk Astle, we can see course-long endeavors that sustain distinct pathways into doing justice work in different R1 university contexts. Through assignments both unique and familiar, the teaching and learning materials forward both theoretical and practical lenses through which Shalini Singh explores students’ metacognition and agency through reflection on visual AI, Emily Bouza implores students to consider opportunities for linguistic justice within their disciplines, Amy Garrett Brown invites students to see their stories in their institutional contexts, Kimberly Groves centers accessible and reflective engagement activities, and Codi Renee Blackmon asks students to explicitly link rhetorical analysis to power, identity, and public action.
We invite you to explore these social justice pedagogies submissions as well as the Syllabus Repository and Teaching and Learning Materials areas of the DRC website. Happy engaging and reflecting!
