The Freedom and Citizenship seminar was initiated in the summer of 2009 by Columbia University’s American Studies Program, in partnership with the Double Discovery Center (DDC), an outreach organization that brings low-income high school students to the Columbia campus for academic tutoring and college guidance. The program is supported by a major grant from the Teagle Foundation as part of its effort to promote partnerships between liberal arts institutions and community-based organizations. The seminar is designed to expose DDC students to an academically rigorous college seminar taught by Columbia faculty. In addition to a daily two-hour seminar taught by Professors Roosevelt Montás and Tamara Mann, students met everyday for skill-building sessions with Columbia undergraduates to review daily writing assignments and to continue class discussions. The seminar lasted three weeks, and, with daily meetings lasting two hours. The texts for the seminar were drawn from the Columbia College Core Curriculum and covered the themes of freedom and citizenship in ancient Greece, the European Enlightenment, and 20th Century America. Authors ranged from Plato and Aristotle to John Locke, Abraham Lincoln, and W.E. B. Dubois.
Over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year, this year's Freedom and Citizenship cohort participated in a civic engagement project based on a contemporary political issue in the United States: mass incarceration. During the Fall semester, students met biweekly to discuss readings on various aspects of our criminal justice system, including institutionalized racism, police violence, the Wars on Drugs and Terror, capitalism and debt, immigration policy, medieval legal concepts, and more. This seminar served as a research and planning period for three forms of student activism that students engaged in during the Spring: filmmaking, radio, and newspaper. After workshopping their project plans in December, students put their ideas into practice by creating a short film, a special newspaper edition, and a radio show designed to encourage further activism toward ending mass incarceration in America. Here are some snapshots of the process: Blog: https://freedomandcitizenship2015.wordpress.com Fall Seminar Syllabus:
Notes on Mass Incarceration:
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