How can we design for equity and justice in our community partnerships? This field guide offers a vision for enacting social justice with community partners. Working from a community’s resources and strengths toward the goal of building its internal capacity, this book considers how actions such as grassroots activism, decolonization efforts, co-resistance movements, and social change initiatives can support reciprocity and mutuality. Community is the Way provides examples of concrete, situated action grounded in disciplinary knowledge and extensive fieldwork. Reflecting on her experiences operating a community writing program, author Aimée Knight argues that the equity-based approach described in this book requires a commitment to interrogating how power, oppression, resistance, privilege, penalties, benefits, and harms are built into the systems we seek to change. Knight offers a community-led approach that builds bridges of understanding and support and charts a path toward transformative change.

Grassroots Engagement and Social Justice through Cooperative Extension grows out of a commitment to the belief that Cooperative Extension professionals can and should be deeply engaged with the communities they work in to improve life—individually and collectively. Rooted in an understanding of the history and development of Extension, the authors focus on contemporary efforts to address systemic inequities. They offer an alternative to the “expert” model that would have Extension educators provide information detached from the difficult and sometimes contentious issues that shape community work. These essays highlight Extension’s role in and responsibility for culturally relevant community education that is rooted in democratic practices and social justice. The ultimate aim of this book is to offer a vision for the future of Extension as its practitioners continue to reach for cultural competence necessary to address issues of systemic injustice in the communities they serve and of which they are a part.

Foreword by Yohuru Williams, Racial Justice Initiative, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. St. Thomas University, Minneapolis; Preface by Asha Rangappa, former FBI agent and Senior Lecturer, Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs

Providing context, reflection points, and ready-to-use lesson plans, this powerful book illuminates the intersections of social justice and media literacy for educators, school and public librarians, teachers of history and civics, information literacy instructors, and community leaders.

The corrosive effects of today’s relentless tide of media are pernicious. We are conditioned in many ways by our media environments to accept and not question, making it crucial that young people master the skills necessary to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media. De Abreu and her fellow contributors propose that a key solution to our society’s crisis of misinformation, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding lies in melding social justice aims with media literacy concepts and skills. Featuring reflective activities and lesson ideas that can be adapted for educational settings from higher education to the K-12 spectrum, community centers, and libraries, this resource

• spotlights the work of school library media specialists, classroom teachers, academic educators, and representatives of non-profits from around the world;
• presents ten chapters which explore such timely issues as how to deal with controversial topics in the classroom, the effects of misinformation/disinformation on civics in society, why the media underrepresents certain people in their programming, the digital divide and where libraries fit in, how injustice exacerbates public health issues, and global conceptions of social justice and media literacy examined through various world events; and
• provides information about additional resources like social action/advocacy organizations, classroom resources, and films that will assist readers as they reflect upon, teach, and discuss media literacy and social justice.

San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers at just over 3 percent. The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.

Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story explores the intersection between immigration and pedagogy via the narrative form. Embedded in the contexts of both student writing and student reading of literature chapters by scholars from four-year and two-year colleges and universities across the country, this book engages the topic of immigration within writing and literature courses as the site for extending, critiquing, and challenging assumptions about justice and equity while deepening students’ sense of ethics and humanity.
 
Each of the chapters recognizes the prevalence of immigrant students in writing classrooms across the United States—including foreign-born, first- and second-generation Americans, and more—and the myriad opportunities and challenges those students present to their instructors. These contributors have seen the validity in the stories and experiences these students bring to the classroom—evidence of their lifetimes of complex learning in both academic and nonacademic settings. Like thousands of college-level instructors in the United States, they have immigrant stories of their own. The immigrant “narrative” offers a unique framework for knowledge production in which students and teachers may learn from each other, in which the ordinary power dynamic of teacher and students begins to shift, to enable empathy to emerge and to provide space for an authentic kind of pedagogy.
 
By engaging writing and literature teachers within and outside the classroom, Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story speaks to the immigrant narrative as a viable frame for teaching writing—an opportunity for building and articulating knowledge through academic discourse. The book creates a platform for immigration as a writing and literary theme, a framework for critical thinking, and a foundation for significant social change and advocacy.
 
Contributors: Tuli Chatterji, Katie Daily, Libby Garland, Silvia Giagnoni, Sibylle Gruber, John Havard, Timothy Henderson, Brennan Herring, Lilian Mina, Rachel Pate, Emily Schnee, Elizabeth Stone