Anti-racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices builds upon anti-racist community-engaged traditions that BIPOC academics and community members have created through more than a century of collaboration across university and community. It demonstrates both the progress and the work that still needs to be done.
The book is organized around the Anti-racist Community Engagement Principles--principles developed by the editors as part of their shared work and dialogue with colleagues regionally and across the country--thus revealing the groundswell of work already underway to center anti-racist values and to pivot away from the traditional, higher ed-centric, and white saviour ways of doing community engagement teaching, research, and practice.
The chapters in this book are organized into four sections based on the four Anti-racist Community Engagement Principles. Based on Principle I, the first section explores how to counteract the persistence and impact of racism on our campuses and in our community engagement work by reframing our institutional and pedagogical practices. In the second section, authors engage with Principle II and share practices that promote critical reflection on individual and systemic/structural racism through examinations of positionality, bias, and historical roots of systemic racism. The third section draws on Principle III to examine intentional learning and course design through anti-racist learning goals, course content, policies, and assessment. Finally, the fourth section, which builds on Principle IV, shows how authors have developed compassionate and reflective classrooms by creating a sense of belonging that acknowledges student cultural assets and contributions, meeting students where they are to co-create a supportive anti-racist learning environment.
Each chapter begins with a specific example that describes the nature and context of the anti-racist community-engaged work, with a practice section offering insight on details of anti-racist community engagement work and providing roadmaps for adapting or replicating that work. Finally, the connections section places the case and its practices into broader contexts of pedagogical, curricular, institutional, and community change.
There is an open access digital companion to the volume, where authors have shared materials that will help shed further light on their compelling practices, including syllabi, agendas, handouts, worksheets, and additional resources.
