Bryn Mawr Authors
Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership
by Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor, Department of Education
Faculty and staff in higher education are looking for ways to address the deep inequity and systemic racism that pervade our colleges and universities. Pedagogical partnership can be a powerful tool to enhance equity, inclusion, and justice in our classrooms and curricula. These partnerships create opportunities for students from underrepresented and equity-seeking groups to collaborate with faculty and staff to revise and reinvent pedagogies, assessments, and course designs, positioning equity and justice as core educational aims. When students have a seat at the table, previously unheard voices are amplified, and diversity and difference introduce essential perspectives that are too often overlooked.In particular, the book contributes to the literature on pedagogical partnership and equity in education by integrating theory, synthesizing research, and providing concrete examples of the ways partnership can contribute to more equitable educational systems. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that partnership can only realize its full potential to redress harms and promote equity and justice when thoughtfully enacted. This book is a resource that will inspire and challenge a wide variety of higher education faculty and staff and contribute to advancing both practice and research on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnerships. Presenting a conceptual framework for understanding the various epistemological, affective, and ontological harms that face students from equity-seeking groups in postsecondary education, Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership applies this conceptual framework to current literature in partnerships, highlighting the promise of partnership as the way to redress these harms. The authors ground both the conceptual framework and the literature review by offering two case studies of pedagogical partnership in practice. They then explore the complexities raised by their framework, including the conditions under which partnerships themselves may risk reproducing epistemic, affective, or ontological harms. Applying the framework in this way allows them to propose strategies that make it more likely for these mediations to be successful. Finally, the authors focus on the future of pedagogical partnership and share their perspectives on new directions for inquiry and practice. After summarizing the overarching themes developed throughout the book, the authors leave the reader with a set of questions and recommendations for further inquiry and discussion.
A Series on Engaged Learning and Teaching Book. Visit the books' companion website, hosted by the Center for Engaged Learning, for book resources.
Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood
by Dawn Dow BMC ' 96
Bad Animal
by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer '20
Bad Animal is a collection of poems about the body, about violence, about safety, a meditation on love, sex, and death. It explores the body's changing relationship to desire in the aftermath of incredible sexual trauma, and how we societally reconcile the beauty of the world we live in with intense emotional pain. Bad Animal is a collection of poems that remind the reader we are all made of flesh and bone and while flesh is temporary and fragile, bone is hard and resilient: both are needed to be whole. Nature is present throughout these poems which echoes the real world-a world that needs both vulture and carcass, a world that needs both dark and light.
***
Oh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. Conjuring a world where Danger sometimes wears the face of Pleasure, and vice versa, these poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won't soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer's language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.
Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
Bad Animal is fierce, smart, knows language as a kind of mating dance with the reader, a lever into the interior, and a demon possession. It's aware of its body as text and texture, a source of hurt and a source of rapture. It has a hawk heart and a crow mind. Bad Animalis memorable for its avidity, its "renegade" desire, its scholarship of "little violences". It puts you under a spell. It gallops inside you.
Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
It's a miracle for a poetry collection to wind up so smart and so moving at once. I read Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal in one gulp, then reopened it and started over, for it rewards study. Brave new offering to the literary world, and the first of many books I'll buy from this astonishing young poet. Buy this book!
Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar's Club
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal subtly questions the contours of comfort throughout the inevitable cycles of life-beginnings, endings, death, pain, love. This book is at once a soothing lyrical balm with the sonic authority of a bomb. Read it and experience the power of a deftly written and precisely conceived work of art.
Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra & Bread and Circus
From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence
Mindy Fullilove is the 2023 holder of the Flexner Lectureship.
by Mindy Fullilove BMC '71
A public health approach to understanding and eliminating excessive police violence.
Excessive police violence and its disproportionate targeting of minority communities has existed in the United States since police forces first formed in the colonial period. A personal tragedy for its victims, for the people who love them, and for their broader communities, excessive police violence is also a profound violation of human and civil rights.
Most public discourse about excessive police violence focuses, understandably, on the horrors of civilian deaths. In From Enforcers to Guardians, Hannah L. F. Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove approach the issue from a radically different angle: as a public health problem. By using a public health framing, this book challenges readers to recognize that the suffering created by excessive police violence extends far outside of death to include sexual, psychological, neglectful, and nonfatal physical violence as well.
Arguing that excessive police violence has been deliberately used to marginalize working-class and minority communities, Cooper and Fullilove describe what we know about the history, distribution, and health impacts of police violence, from slave patrols in colonial times to war on drugs policing in the present-day United States. Finally, the book surveys efforts, including Barack Obama's 2015 creation of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, to eliminate police violence, and proposes a multisystem, multilevel strategy to end marginality and police violence and to achieve guardian policing.
Aimed at anyone seeking to understand the causes and distributions of excessive police violence--and to develop interventions to end it--From Enforcers to Guardians frames excessive police violence so that it can be understood, researched, and taught about through a public health lens.
Jennifer Chan is Not Alone
by Tae Keller
Wednesday, November 29
Recognize and Give Thanks
by Marcia Cantarella '68
My grandkids - - on both sides of my family both Black and White - - are the fifth generation to go to college. That makes them essentially unicorns.
I come from a long line of educators, disruptors and change agents.Beginning with my grandfather Whitney Young Sr. who ran a school with a secret college prep curriculum from the 1920s to the 1950s, to his son Whitney Young Jr., my father, who was the architect of the War on Poverty with LBJ, or his sister Arnita who flew planes for the Red Cross during WWII we have been engaged in making change. I have known powerful leaders, black and white who have been change agents and many have been part of our family legacy, and many continue that legacy today. We have had friends and allies from the white community whether serving with the National Urban League for my father or being life partners like my late husband Fancesco Cantarella, a leader in corporate responsibility.
I have had the chance to engage with college students, especially students of color to see them now in key leadership roles themselves. There have been the friends, classmates and allies with whom I have worked and played and who are change agents themselves yet unsung. There are so many that I know, and love and value who have been part of the battle for social good and equity. Yet so many are not recognized, let alone fully thanked for all they do or have done. This is my chance to do that through telling the story of how these people have been an amazing gift in my own life
Social Work Sociometry and Psychodrama
by Scott Giacomucci
Trouble With You
by Ellen Feldman BMC '64
"Rich in colorful characters, Feldman's riveting tale is one of resilience, determination, and hope." --Booklist
In an exuberant post WWII New York City, a young woman is forced to reinvent her life and choose between the safe and the ethical, and the men who represent each...
Set in New York City in the heady aftermath of World War II when the men were coming home, the women were exhaling in relief, and everyone was having babies, The Trouble With Youis the story of a young woman whose rosy future is upended in a single instant. Raised never to step out of bounds, educated in one of the Sister Seven Colleges for a career as a wife and mother, torn between her cousin Mimi who is determined to keep her a "nice girl"--the kind that marries a doctor--and her aunt Rose who has a rebellious past of her own, Fanny struggles to raise her young daughter and forge a new life by sheer will and pluck. When she gets a job as a secretary to the "queen" of radio serials--never to be referred to as soaps--she discovers she likes working, and through her friendship with an actress who stars in the series and a man who writes them, comes face to face with the blacklist which is destroying careers and wrecking lives. Ultimately, Fanny must decide between playing it safe or doing what she knows is right in this vivid evocation of a world that seems at once light years away and strangely immediate.
#Actuallyautistic Guide to Advocacy
by Jennifer Brunton BMC '92
The #ActuallyAutistic Guide to Advocacy takes an in-depth look at the key elements of effective, respectful, inclusive advocacy and allyship. Every topic was chosen, shaped, and informed by #ActuallyAutistic perspectives.
The step-by-step guide discusses various aspects of how autism is perceived, explores how best to speak up for individual needs, and introduces advocacy for the wider autistic community. Each step outlines one vital aspect of advocacy and allyship, such as emphasizing acceptance, avoiding assumptions and assuming competence. The advice and strategies laid out in this guide center the wisdom and experiences of Autistic people and enable the reader to confidently speak up with insight and understanding.Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning
by Alison Cook-Sather - Professor of Education
Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning invites readers to help forge a more inclusive and accessible college education by incorporating student voices via pedagogical partnerships.
Alison Cook-Sather, a pioneer of this co-creative approach, draws on more than twenty years of experience developing student-teacher partnerships in higher education to offer a wise and generous work that speaks to both students and educators. As her research underscores, a co-creative learning environment, in which relationships and communication between students and teachers are prioritized, benefits the educational experience on many levels.
Cook-Sather demonstrates how pedagogical partnerships give students the tools to advocate for their own learning while giving educators the feedback they need to improve classroom experiences. She shows how the co-creative model helps to bring about inclusive spaces and equitable teaching practices that better foster student success, especially among underrepresented and minority student populations.
Offering actionable guidance, Cook-Sather advocates enacting the following four principles to structure student voice into higher education: embracing a commitment to equity and justice; providing structure rather than prescriptions for engagement; making rather than taking up space; and developing a partnership mindset. She grounds these principles in examples of practices drawn from an undergraduate education course; a faculty development program; and cross-disciplinary, cross-constituency institutional dialogues.
This work calls for readers to reimagine the higher education structure and to cultivate an environment in which all stakeholders can work together to advance inclusivity, accessibility, and equity. As the author argues, co-creation can be a catalyst for change throughout the system.