Download to read offline
![Information injustice
Title: “The Latino Contribution to American Life is Not Outstanding”
“Latin America has always been a backwater of Western Civilization,
except in literature.
“Latin America has been the least creative outpost of the West.”
“Perhaps [Fidel] Castro’s (hopefully imminent) demise should free up
Cuba’s tremendous talent.”
“America is unlikely to find many creative geniuses among Hispanic
immigrants—especially among illegal ones” (Sailer).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/criticalandrenewableassignmentsforinformationjusticek-211019212731/75/WACCy-Wednesday-Webinar-Open-Pedagogy-to-Support-EDI-Critical-and-Renewable-Assignments-for-Information-Justice-Kathy-Swart-060921-as-6-2048.jpg)
![More examples of misinformation
“The Atlantic Slave Trade. . .brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States
to work on agricultural plantations” (McGraw-Hill in Wong).
“There were only about 1,000,000 North American Indians” [before European colonizers arrived]
(American Tradition in Loewen 103).
The Black Panther Party were “mere criminals” (“The Sixties left” 12) and “at the vanguard of
armed struggle that constituted the ‘New Left terrorism’” (Lambert 105).
The U.S. supported dictatorships across Latin America “to contain the Cuban and Soviet threats”
(Loveman).
“America must be willing to change its hands-off, non-interventionist policies” because they
contribute to the refugee crisis (Garner).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/criticalandrenewableassignmentsforinformationjusticek-211019212731/75/WACCy-Wednesday-Webinar-Open-Pedagogy-to-Support-EDI-Critical-and-Renewable-Assignments-for-Information-Justice-Kathy-Swart-060921-as-7-2048.jpg)
![Works Cited or Consulted
Bales, Stephen E., and Lea S. Engle. "The Counterhegemonic Academic Librarian: A Call to Action." Progressive Librarian, no. 40, 2012, pp.
16-40. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.pierce.ctc.edu:2057/docview/1326317755?accountid=2280.
Black, Jan Knippers. United States Penetration of Brazil. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977.
Cambiar Investors, “Todd Edwards, PhD,” Cambiar Investors, September 23, 2020, https://www.cambiar.com/people/todd-edwards/.
Carter, Rodney. "Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence." Archivaria [Online], 61 (2006): 215-233. Web
22 Sep. 2019.
Comissão Nacional da Verdade. “Relatório da Comissão Nacional da Verdade.” CNV. Comissão Nacional da Verdade. December 10, 2014.
http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/todos-volume-1/610-documentos-citados-volume-i.html.
Edwards, Todd. Brazil: A Global Studies Handbook. ABC-CLIO, 2007.
Garner, Godfrey. "Non-intervention Policies Contribute to Refugee Crisis." American Diplomacy, 2015. Opposing Viewpoints in Context,
http://ezproxy.pierce.ctc.edu:2085/apps/doc/A443283124/OVIC?u=puya65247&sid=OVIC&xid=7ad2fd96. Accessed 18 May 2019.
Green, James Naylor. We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States. Duke University Press,
2010.
Huggins, Martha Knisely. Political Policing: The United States and Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Lambert, Laura. "Black Panther Party." The SAGE Encyclopedia of Terrorism, edited by Gus Martin, 2nd ed., SAGE Reference, 2011, pp. 105-106.
Gale eBooks,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX1562000072/GVRL?u=puya65247&sid=GVRL&xid=bed782b6. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.
Langguth, A.J. “America’s History of Torture.” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-may-03-oe-
langguth3-story.html.
Leacock, Ruth. Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969. Ashland, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2013.
Loveman, Brian. "Dictatorship: Military Dictatorships in Latin America." The Oxford Encyclopedia of The Modern World, edited by Peter N. Stearns,
vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 520-523. Gale eBooks,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX1549100560/GVRL?u=puya65247&sid=GVRL&xid=1279d7a9. Accessed 5 May 2021.
MacMichael, David. “Brazil: General’s Coup.” In Encyclopedia of Conflicts since World War II, edited by James Ciment, M.E. Sharpe, 2007,
p. 361.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/criticalandrenewableassignmentsforinformationjusticek-211019212731/75/WACCy-Wednesday-Webinar-Open-Pedagogy-to-Support-EDI-Critical-and-Renewable-Assignments-for-Information-Justice-Kathy-Swart-060921-as-30-2048.jpg)
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WACCy Wednesday Webinar Open Pedagogy to Support EDI - Critical and Renewable Assignments for Information Justice Kathy Swart 060921 as
- 1. Critical and Renewable Assignmentsfor Information Justice Kathy Swart, M.A., M.L.I.S. WACCy Wednesday, June 9, 2021
- 2.
- 3. How I discovered information injustice "Caetano Veloso,Fundo Correio da Manhã" by Unknown, Brazilian National Archives is in the Public Domain
- 4.
- 5.
- 6. Information injustice Title: “TheLatino Contribution to American Life is Not Outstanding” “Latin America has always been a backwater of Western Civilization, except in literature. “Latin America has been the least creative outpost of the West.” “Perhaps [Fidel] Castro’s (hopefully imminent) demise should free up Cuba’s tremendous talent.” “America is unlikely to find many creative geniuses among Hispanic immigrants—especially among illegal ones” (Sailer).
- 7. More examples ofmisinformation “The Atlantic Slave Trade. . .brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations” (McGraw-Hill in Wong). “There were only about 1,000,000 North American Indians” [before European colonizers arrived] (American Tradition in Loewen 103). The Black Panther Party were “mere criminals” (“The Sixties left” 12) and “at the vanguard of armed struggle that constituted the ‘New Left terrorism’” (Lambert 105). The U.S. supported dictatorships across Latin America “to contain the Cuban and Soviet threats” (Loveman). “America must be willing to change its hands-off, non-interventionist policies” because they contribute to the refugee crisis (Garner).
- 8. Tanques ocupam aAvenida Presidente Vargas, 1968-04-04, Remasterizada, 2016-01-13 by Correio da Manhã.
- 9. Brazil, 1964 President JoãoGoulart • Democratically elected • Mildly progressive • Proposed agrarian reform • Wanted to nationalize resources (Hanna Mining) • Wanted to slow repatriation of profits to foreign companies • Neutral in Cold War (not communist)
- 10.
- 11. Tortured by thedictatorship Dilma Rousseff, Former President of Brazil Augusto Boal Paulo Coelho Fred Morris, U.S. pastor
- 12. Persecuted by thedictatorship Maria Auxiliadora Lara Barcelos Medical student Tito de Alencar Lima Dominican priest Chael Charles Schreier Medical student Honestino Monteiro Guimares Student Vladmir Herzog journalist Stuart Angel student Luiz Edwardo Merlino journalist Marilena Villas Boas Pinto psychology student Alexandre Vannucchi Leme geology student
- 13. Children tortured bythe dictatorship
- 14. United States involvement •U.S. spent millions to subvert President Goulart (Alves 6, Green 30) • Financed coup plotters via business groups (Leacock 65, Black) • CIA infiltrated opposition and made propaganda to create illusion of a communist threat (MacMichael 361) • Operation Brother Sam in case coup met resistance (Green 46) • Repression and torture training (Langguth Hidden Terrors, Motta, Green 30-34, Petras 44-52). "Lyndon B. Johnson" by U.S. Government is in the Public Domain, CC0
- 15. False narratives in2016 “Before the 1964 coup, Brazil was a Communist country.” “President João Goulart was overthrown because he was a Communist.”
- 16. What do “authoritativesources” say?
- 17. Language of misinformation Facts 1964Coup Military Dictatorship Dictator Ernesto Geisel Dictators Civilians opposed to regime Victims of dictatorship Reason for coup Authoritative sources 1964 “Revolution” Military “Republic” Champion of democracy Praiseworthy “Guerillas,” “terrorists” “Violence-minded” “Progress” and “development”
- 18. Omissions U.S. role Weapons, officertraining, support of coup (Leacock 120) CIA funding (Green 19-48) CIA propaganda creating illusion of communist threat CIA infiltration of Northeast (MacMichael 361, Black 131) U.S. financing U.S. businesses and corporations U.S. funding of IPES and IBAD Brazilian businesses Multinational corporations Repression Human rights abuses against: Indigenous Peoples Afro-Brazilians Journalists, musicians, artists, workers, landless USAID training (Motta 244-57; Skidmore 155). Book documenting torture, Torture in Brazil Operation Cleanup Operation Condor Operation Brother Sam Impunity for torturers
- 19. Who wrote these“authoritative sources”? John WF Dulles Todd Edwards Investment Principal Cambiar Investors Paul G. Goodwin
- 20. Consequences of FalseNarratives "Pinochet" by M M G is licensed under CC BY- NC-SA 2.0 "National Stadium Santiago" by Santiagonostalgico is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
- 21. False narratives continue "Encontrodo Assessor de Segurança Nacional dos EUA John Bolton com Presidente Eleito do Brasil Jair Bolsonaro" by U.S. Embassy Brasilia is in the Public Domain, CC0 "Portrait of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva" by Ricardo Stuckert, Agênica Brasil is licensed under CC BY 3.0
- 22. Critical theory predictsinformation justice "Gramsci" by Unknown is in the Public Domain Antonio Gramsci Hegemony is maintained by embedding dominant ideas in social institutions (Cope 18). The School is the primary social institution (Althusser). Through repetition, dominant ideas become “naturalized” (Bales and Engle). These dominant ideas omit the exploitation of marginalized groups by the dominant class (Bales and Engle 62). Academics who don’t question these dominant ideas unwittingly further the status quo (Gramsci qtd. in Bales and Engle). 22
- 23. Recycling of misinformation 23 Curriculum Professors teachthe curriculum Dominant narratives
- 24. Who doesn’t writeinformation • Indigenous Peoples • African Americans • Latina/Latino/Latinx • Immigrants • LGBTQ • Economically disadvantaged • Women
- 25.
- 26. Amplifying Marginalized Voices Amplifying Latin AmericanVoices in the Social Sciences
- 27. Identifying & Respondingto Misinformation “Challenging Authority”
- 28. Transitioning to Open Education(Renewable Assignments) Student Written Glossaries
- 29. Thank you! “Education doesn’t transformthe world. Education changes people. People change the world.” -- Paulo Freire kswart@pierce.ctc.edu
- 30. Works Cited orConsulted Bales, Stephen E., and Lea S. Engle. "The Counterhegemonic Academic Librarian: A Call to Action." Progressive Librarian, no. 40, 2012, pp. 16-40. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.pierce.ctc.edu:2057/docview/1326317755?accountid=2280. Black, Jan Knippers. United States Penetration of Brazil. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977. Cambiar Investors, “Todd Edwards, PhD,” Cambiar Investors, September 23, 2020, https://www.cambiar.com/people/todd-edwards/. Carter, Rodney. "Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence." Archivaria [Online], 61 (2006): 215-233. Web 22 Sep. 2019. Comissão Nacional da Verdade. “Relatório da Comissão Nacional da Verdade.” CNV. Comissão Nacional da Verdade. December 10, 2014. http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/todos-volume-1/610-documentos-citados-volume-i.html. Edwards, Todd. Brazil: A Global Studies Handbook. ABC-CLIO, 2007. Garner, Godfrey. "Non-intervention Policies Contribute to Refugee Crisis." American Diplomacy, 2015. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http://ezproxy.pierce.ctc.edu:2085/apps/doc/A443283124/OVIC?u=puya65247&sid=OVIC&xid=7ad2fd96. Accessed 18 May 2019. Green, James Naylor. We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States. Duke University Press, 2010. Huggins, Martha Knisely. Political Policing: The United States and Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Lambert, Laura. "Black Panther Party." The SAGE Encyclopedia of Terrorism, edited by Gus Martin, 2nd ed., SAGE Reference, 2011, pp. 105-106. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX1562000072/GVRL?u=puya65247&sid=GVRL&xid=bed782b6. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021. Langguth, A.J. “America’s History of Torture.” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-may-03-oe- langguth3-story.html. Leacock, Ruth. Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969. Ashland, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2013. Loveman, Brian. "Dictatorship: Military Dictatorships in Latin America." The Oxford Encyclopedia of The Modern World, edited by Peter N. Stearns, vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 520-523. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX1549100560/GVRL?u=puya65247&sid=GVRL&xid=1279d7a9. Accessed 5 May 2021. MacMichael, David. “Brazil: General’s Coup.” In Encyclopedia of Conflicts since World War II, edited by James Ciment, M.E. Sharpe, 2007, p. 361.
- 31. Motta, Rodrigo PattoSá. “Modernizing Repression: Usaid and the Brazilian Police,” Revista Brasileira de História vol. 30, 2010, pp. 235- 262, http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0102-01882010000100012&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en. Petras, James F. and Morley, Morris H. “U.S. Policy Toward Chile in the Context of the Peruvian and Brazilian Models.” The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government. Monthly Review Press, 1975. Pitts, Bryan, et al. “The Not-so Invisible Hand of Uncle Sam.” Brasil Wire, 2 Nov. 2018, www.brasilwire.com/the-not-so-invisible-hand-of-uncle-sam/. Accessed 14 April 2021. Raber, Douglas. “Librarians as Organic Intellectuals: A Gramscian Approach to Blind Spots and Tunnel Vision.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy vol. 73 no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 33-53. Sailer, Steve. "The Latino Contribution to American Life Is Not Outstanding." The U.S. Latino Community, edited by Margaret Haerens, Greenhaven Press, 2011. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http://ezproxy.pierce.ctc.edu:2085/apps/ doc/EJ3010750207/OVIC?u=puya65247&sid=OVIC&xid=5fc29d70. Accessed 10 Apr. 2019. Originally published as "Latin American Immigration Unlikely to Spark a New Renaissance," VDARE.com, 2004. "The Sixties left included mere criminals (the Black Panthers) and terrorists (Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and friends)." National Review, vol. 72, no. 8, 4 May 2020, p. 12. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A621084410/OVIC?u=puya65247&sid=OVIC&xid=d7ad0e4f. Accessed 28 Apr. 2021. Skidmore, Thomas E. “Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: An Experiment in Democracy.” New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007. Weis, W. Michael. “Government News Management, Bias and Distortion in American Press Coverage of the Brazilian Coup.” Social Science Journal 34, no. 1 (January 1997): 35. http://ezproxy.pierce.ctc.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9703115892&scope=site. Wong, Alia. 2015. “History Class and the Fictions about Race in America.” The Atlantic, October 21. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10 /the-history-class-dilemma/411601/. Young, Kevin. “Washing U.S. Hands of the Dirty Wars: News Coverage Erases Washington's Role in State Terror.” NACLA, July 22, 2013. https://nacla.org/news/2013/7/22/washing-us-hands-dirty-wars-news-coverage-erases-washington%E2%80%99s-role-state-terror. Works Cited or Consulted (cont.)
Editor's Notes
- #2 Thank you Lesley, Alissa, and Sarah for organizing this and allowing me to be a part of WACCy Wednesday. I’m happy to share the results of my sabbatical with you today, 34 adaptable, renewable assignments that engage students in critically and positively responding to a problematic information landscape.
- #3 The assignments fall into 3 groups. I’ll highlight an example from each, but mostly today I’m going to illustrate the problems that these assignments address.
- #4 To explain what my sabbatical project was about, I have to tell you the story of how I fell in love with Brazilian music. It was only be coincidence while searching for something else that I discovered Caetano Veloso and his book about the short-lived but extremely influential Tropicália movement in music. He’s been a world famous musician for decades, but like many people in the U.S., I’d never heard of him. The book relates Veloso’s experience during Brazil’s military dictatorship, and he wrote it to counter those who at the end of the regime said, “Let’s just turn the page” and forget about all the horrific human rights abuses. When reading it I had the same reaction as when I read about Gandhi as a young adult—WHY DIDN’T I KNOW THIS? WHY DIDN’T I LEARN ABOUT THIS IN SCHOOL? COLLEGE? GRAD SCHOOL either time? The history Veloso lived through appears to be one of the most well-guarded secrets in the world, along with Brazilian music itself.
- #5 Fortunately, as a faculty member at Pierce College I was able to bring bring two groups of amazing students to Rio de Janeiro, and introduce them to this history and Brazil’s rich culture. My students learned about and perform beautiful Afro-Brazilian tradition of Candomblé as well as and capoeira, from people who have survived incredible challenges due to the lingering effects of colonialism, slavery, and authoritarianism. The trip moved the students and changed their lives. One said it showed him everything he believed about Brazil was wrong.
- #6 I wasn’t surprised. I’d been noticing faulty information about Latin America for years, ever since I replaced the textbook and globalized the content of the Humanities 101 course through OER materials. Once the students started researching artists from other countries, especially Latin America, they started repeating claims that sounded like warmed over McCarthy era propaganda—and they were. For years I’ve been examining the academic information landscape and find it full of false narratives had gaping omissions. Worse, I find racism.
- #7 This is the title of an essay from the Opposing Viewpoints database. I’ll let you read these excerpts one at a time. You can imagine how a student of Latinx origin would feel reading this. Or an immigrant from a Latin American country. We would object to such false and racist statements anywhere we found them, but the fact that they appear in a library database is even more shocking and potentially damaging: Students think because they found it through the library, it’s true.
- #8 Here are some more examples. As you read them, think about who might have written them. What voice do you detect? Whose voice is missing? What would those other voices say?
- #9 For a more detailed illustration of information justice, we’ll look at Brazil’s 1964 coup. First I’ll review the facts, which are well documented by scholars.
- #10 CLICK In 1961, Janio Quadros resigned, leaving Joao Goulart the democratically elected president. (Brazil used to elect their vice presidents as well.) Then CLICK through rest.
- #11 What happened on day of coup? The Brazilian military, with funding from business groups and support from the United States, claimed they were throwing a “revolution” against incipient communism, corruption and general chaos. But their tanks rolled down empty streets. No resistance, communist, or otherwise, appeared. The only violence came from the military, who burned the literature in the students’ union headquarters and fired on 3 unarmed students, killing them. Then began Operation Cleanup in which 7,000 civilians were arrested. People began to be tortured, exiled, and killed, and the 21-year dictatorship was underway.
- #12 These are some of the people tortured by Brazil’s dictatorship.
- #13 Here are some statistics: 10,000 exiled, 20,000 killed, 20,000 tortured. I have to give a trigger warning for those who have suffered personal violence. Here are some of the faces of those tortured to death. With equal viciousness, the dictatorship’s officers persecuted suspected members of resistance groups, union organizers, peasant leaders, clergy members, left-leaning students, and journalists, who they indiscriminately labeled as “subversives,” “communists,” or “terrorists.” The systematic repression involved rape, impaling with pepper-coated rods, mutilating the genitals, ripping off fingernails, water torture, and the most common technique, the “parrot’s perch” (pau de arara). hanging them from a pole for hours or days while electrodes delivered electric shocks to the most sensitive body parts.
- #14 The regime even tortured children.
- #15 Subvert Goulart…through funneling money to his opponents in the 1962 elections. CIA… for example, in their effort to to portray Brazil on the brink of a “Red takeover” they financed groups who dressed up as peasants, proclaimed themselves communists, and set fire to landowners’ buildings. They distributed Marxist literature across the impoverished Northeast so that after the coup they could point to it as “proof” of communist penetration.
- #16 And so you can imagine my surprise when the first year I had assigned students Latin American artists they brought back this: CLICK I saw this as a teachable moment--a chance to show them where to find authoritative sources, rather than what they had used: outdated public library reference books and CIA declassified internal propaganda. Then I went in search of those more ideal sources.
- #17 Plenty of monographs exist with documented history I just related to you, so I assumed I’d find a condensed version of that in reference works. Guess what I found?
- #20 Does the name Dulles sound familiar? J WF Dulles was a mining executive with—you guessed it, Hanna Mining. He was also the son of John Foster Dulles of coups in Iran and Guatemala fame and nephew of Allan Dulles, who headed the CIA. Both were rabid anti-communists Hanna Mining profited immensely from coup. U.S. officials made a pact with the first dictator Castelo Branco to cancel Goulart’s plan to nationalize the company. Dulles had a B.A. in philosophy, a B.S. in metallurgy, and an MBA, but somehow ended up writing encyclopedia entries and books on Brazilian history. The next is the author of a college-level textbook. When I tried to get a CV on him from my own alma mater, I got bizarre responses. First I was told I’d made a FOIA request when I hadn’t. Then they said they had no CV on him despite the fact he ran the Latin American Studies program. Finally they sent me a heavily redacted CV that with a 20 year gap. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Todd Edwards got his PhD in Latin American studies and went straight to Wall Street. He’s currently an Investment Principal and “co-Portfolio Manager at Cambiar Global Equity and International Small Cap strategies.” Considering that U.S. financial investments played a significant role in driving Brazil’s coup, it’s understandable he might want to downplay that fact. It might even make him completely gloss over the human rights abuses. But most of us scholars would question the ethics of doing so.
- #21 When publishers allow the military, intelligence, and Wall Street write the Official Story about U.S. foreign relations in Latin America, they’ve abandoned any pretense of neutrality. Historian Michael Weis analyzed how the media’s role in maintaining a false narrative about Brazil’s coup “served… U.S. interests but at the cost of misleading the public and perpetuating the cold war mentality.” 9 years later, the U.S. backed the coup in Chile, which caused 30,000 deaths during one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. Historian Bryan Pitts points out that Brazil was only one in a long line of similar U.S.-backed military coups that disproportionally harmed black and brown people across the continent.
- #22 You might say, oh that’s just history, the government can’t engage in such narrative steering anymore. It still does. For years the U.S. mainstream media has applauded Brazilian judge Sergio Moro as a fighter against corruption, accolades that earned him the cover of TIME magazine. On the right you see Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who many consider a threat to the Amazon as well as human rights in Brazil, standing beside John Bolton, former National Security But it turns out Sergio Moro was guilty of bias, illegality, and collusion with the U.S.-Department of Justice in a plot that jailed Bolsonaro’s opponent, former president Lula, enabling Bolsonaro to become president essentially through fraudulent means. For years the U CLICK Now, as Le Monde reports, “the biggest anti-corruption operation in the history of Brazil has become its biggest legal scandal”. CLICK Just days ago, this came out: CLICK Will this latest bit of news be picked up in the US mainstream media? I doubt it. And so history repeats itself.
- #23 None of this would surprise Gramci, who held that READ slide
- #24 When I began reading works of critical librarian ship drawing on Gramsci, my students’ strange repetitions of Cold War propaganda began to make more sense. I’d become part of a system that recycled false dominant narratives without even realizing it.
- #25 One reason why dominant narratives go unquestioned concerns who writes information and who doesn’t. As you might guess, those who produce information form a very limited group, and not a diverse one. That explains why we get narratives that don’t reflect the experience, voices, or perspectives of BIPOC and other marginalized groups. How can we disrupt these narratives? How can we fill in the gaps where the voices of the marginalized ought to be but aren’t?
- #26 These questions drove my sabbatical and to come up research assignments faculty from any discipline can adapt. The assignments are designed to engage students in: Examining all information with informed skepticism. Doing LATERAL READING Exposing, challenging, and responding to racism and misinformation in all types of information. Emphasizing alternative discourses, materials, voices, and Asking whose voices are missing.
- #27 I’ll start with the group of assignments called Amplifying Marginalized Voices. This one concerns Latin American or Latinx women who were active in social justice movements. (GO TO ASSIGNMENT) Each assignment includes an overview for faculty, an example of how a student could do the assignment, and an introduction for students, followed by instructions and generic grading rubric, all of which can be tailored to faculty’s own preferences. The example here focuses on Marielle Franco, a woman who grew up in the favela or slums of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and became a city councilor. Bisexual, Afro-Brazilian, and a woman, she had 3 strikes against her already, but when she spoke out against the military occupation of Rio that targeted Afro-Brazilians, she was assassinated. There is an option to create a document to openly share it. That way students work puts better information into the world, can fill those gaps. I can guarantee very few students are going to learn about Marielle Franco otherwise.
- #28 I based this assignment on the racist article by Steven Sailer I showed you earlier. Faculty gather their own examples of misinformation or have students look for extreme bias. Hint: try Opposing Viewpoints. Students choose an example of information injustice, explore it, and then write to the publisher responsible, asking for it to be revised, with suggested sources. At the end I give a sample letter to a database vendor I actually sent that received a positive response. 10/10 now, but I’m only one person.
- #29 In this assignment, students are given glossary topics relating to social justice. They research them and write glossary entries to help students in future iterations of the course. In this group you’ll also find assignments that enlist students in gathering potential course materials to help faculty make the transition to an open or library-based course. Because I realize that can be a tremendous task.
- #30 I hope you’ll look at some of the assignments and feel free adapt them in whatever way is most useful. At the very least, by using critical and open pedagogy, I hope that my students will read the world differently afterwards, and that they’ll go on to become more savvy information consumers as well as better-informed citizens and voters.