This document summarizes the key elements of Black student movements on college campuses from the 1960s to present day. It notes that in 1969, Black and Latinx students at City College/CUNY marched for open admissions and Black studies programs. As of 2014, over 70% of CUNY's nearly 250,000 students were students of color. It then provides examples of Black student activism at the University of Michigan in 1970 and currently. The document goes on to describe two projects in a course focusing on Black and Brown insurgency through digital media and vernacular. It highlights resources for learning more about the instructor's teaching in related areas like digital rhetorics, gender studies, and African American rhetorics
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Black Lives Matter in the Classroom
1. “#BlackFuture is NOW”
Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English, John Jay College/CUNY
Black and Latinx students and community members march
on City College/CUNY demanding Open Admissions and
Black Studies in 1969
2. As of 2014, CUNY’s total enrollment (both part time and full time
students) was nearly 250,000 students, over 70% of which were students
of color.
3. One sample of the Black Campus Movement: THEN AND NOW
University of Michigan, 1970 University of Michigan, This Semester
6. The Projects
Student sample below is taken from a
weebly website:
www.changequalsuccess.weebly.com
Second Project: Collaborative
Website
Students work in teams to create a
website (using weebly) that archives the
digital products and processes (primary
sources) of activists and groups working
for social justice alongside secondary
sources investigating histories and issues.
14. “They weren’t
born from the
body, they
were born
from the soul”
“Mama Gave Birth to the
Soul Children”
by Queen Latifah
featuring De La Soul (1989)
Denied the integrity of our
words, we lose possibility. In
this sense our freedom
depends directly upon our
ability to represent the events
of our lives… In telling the
stories of our reality, both
private and public, spiritual and
material, we assert a future.
The future, though always
apparently beyond our control,
is in actuality a continuing
alternative, one we actively
construct out of our
understanding of past events…
language powers the future.
Gordon Pradl in his introduction
to Prospect and Retrospect:
Selected Essays of James Britton
(1982)
15. With Andrene as a guiding symbol here, I mark this vernacular
technocultural competence within a specific set of possibilities set in
motion by three dynamics:
1) shifting racial demographics at our public schools and
colleges, first most notably achieved in the 1970s where, for
instance, for the first time in U.S. educational history, as many
black students attended PWCs as HBCUs
2) a black protest movement that innovates and relies on the
newest, most available technologies in order to push forth
alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, new
authoring, and textual productions
3) new temporalities for cross-spatial, non-classroom-
contained learning where our students’ connections to justice
and aesthetics are centrally and critically informed by cultural,
popular, and community movements
16. For More on Teaching and Classrooms
realwriting.org (my first year writing and advanced writing
courses)
digirhetorics.org (my courses and projects related to digital
rhetorics)
blackwomenrhetproject.org (my courses related to gender
studies)
carmenkynard.org (“Education, Liberation, and Black Radical
Traditions”[main website])
funkdafied.org (courses related to African American rhetorics
and literacies)
johnjay.digication.com/carmenkynard (Post-Tenure
ePortfolio)