NY college offers course on promoting social justice through teaching

A New York college is offering a course on how certain teaching methods can “decolonize” education and be “an act of social justice.”

Hamilton College is offering a course in spring 2019 on how teachers can respond to “institutionalized inequalities” in the education system through “social justice. The course, EDUC 215, is titled, “Education, Teaching and Social Change.” 

Hamilton’s Education Studies department offers the course, which will be taught by Meredith Madden, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Education Studies.

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The course is focused on analyzing “teaching as an act of social justice in response to fundamental societal problems and institutionalized inequalities embedded in educational institutions,” according to its description.

It goes on to describe how the course considers educational methods for “decolonizing” education while looking “through the lenses of critical theory, intersectionality, and pedagogy.”

The full course description can be read in the course catalog on page 109.

Campus Reform reached out to the school’s Office of Media Relations as well as Madden but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Hamilton College announced a diversity requirement in 2016, wherein students of any concentration would need to take at least one course providing them knowledge with “structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.”

[RELATED: Hamilton College to institute diversity requirement]

The New York school offered courses on sexism and racism in professional sports, as well as white privilege during the 2016-2017 school year.

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