In April 2024 I applied for and received an LSA Race & Ethnicity Course Development Summer Grant to develop a course to fulfill the LSA Race & Ethnicity (R&E) requirement. My first-year writing course, Writing 160: DIY Cultures, already explored race, ethnicity, and other minoritized populations at the intersection of do-it-yourself subcultures, values, and practices so turning that course into an R&E one made perfect sense.
The grant provided a stipend and the opportunity to work with Alisse Portnoy, Associate Professor of English, who mentored the other grant recipients and me in preparing our R&E course proposals. The process included filling out a proposal form and writing an annotated syllabus that identified how my course would address the following:
The meaning of race, ethnicity, and racism
Racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality as it occurs in the U.S. or elsewhere
Comparisons of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, social class, gender identity and/or gender expression, ability/disability status, sexual orientation, or national origin.
Annotating and revising my syllabus forced me to make more explicit the connections I wanted students to make between racism and punk feminists, the history of zines and the Harlem Renaissance, and the multiple forms of oppression and DIY phenomena students wanted to explore.
In early August I submitted my proposal to the LSA subcommittee that reviews R&E proposals; by mid-semester, my students and I learned the course had received official R&E certification. Now I have five years before re-certifying the course and they will be fruitful years where I will continue to deepen the course curriculum’s race and ethnicity connections.
