Professor Solomon, student participants and community partners take part in a community pride event in South Africa.
In support of Colgate’s strategic plan, the Max A. Shacknai COVE announced the availability of new course development grants that promote civic education in the curriculum in 2014. These grants aim to provide faculty with the resources to offer students immediate opportunities to apply classroom learning to support or enhance the work of social change agencies.
The first recipient of the course development grant was Ryan Solomon, a faculty member in the writing and rhetoric department. Solomon applied the grant to his core South Africa course. Four core South Africa students joined Professor Solomon in South Africa for six weeks this summer two more students joined the group for the second half of the trip. The trip, which included three weeks in Johannesburg and three weeks in Cape Town, focused on providing students with a hands-on civic engagement experience including work with two immigrant rights organizations–the African Diaspora Forum and Africa Unite–organizations that are working to combat xenophobic violence in South Africa. While working with these organizations, the students had the opportunity to run human rights workshops, plan new initiatives, and collect data on African immigrants’ experiences of discrimination in South Africa.
While in Johannesburg, the students were also privileged to participate in programming offered by Wits Citizenship and Community Outreach, a recently created civic engagement program at Wits University. That programming provided the students the opportunity to interact with other undergraduate Wits students who were also involved in community service. More importantly, the Colgate students were fortunate to participate in a range of dialogues on race in higher education in South Africa with the Wits students, which allowed them to connect the issues of transformation that South African universities are grappling with to similar struggles at Colgate. Finally, the students met with a range of youth activists in both Johannesburg and Cape Town, who shared experiences about how they became involved in social justice work and both the challenges and rewards of doing that work. The students were inspired by these interactions to engage as activists in their own communities and to better recognize their capacity to make a difference in the various spaces, like Colgate.
Notes from students working during their service-learning experience in South Africa
It is important to note that the trip, although very fulfilling, wasn’t always easy because it confronted both the students and Professor Solomon with a range of difficult questions about the group’s position of privilege relative to the people they were working with, the intractability of the problems of inequality in South Africa, and the dangers of edutourism. But these moments of discomfort were also helpful in creating necessary reflection and forcing the group to be careful not to take the opportunities they were afforded for granted. These moments of discomfort also helped the group better recognize that the work of transformation in both South Africa and United States requires sustained commitment and engagement.