Community Partners

From its inception, the ABC course has attempted to introduce students to the Philadelphia organizing landscape and issues of local significance related to education and activism, while providing opportunities for direct engagement with community activists. While the two previous versions of the course invited students to connect with local advocates and engage in dialogue around community-based organizing work, the Fall 2019 iteration of the course purposefully shifts from a community engagement model to a partnership model. Engaging community members after students have already determined topics of inquiry, as was the case in previous iterations, does little to cultivate reciprocity or mutual benefit within university-community relations. In fact, this dynamic can reproduce a pattern of knowledge and resource extraction that undermines the possibility of meaningful collaborations with local communities.

For students, our approach will provide a more substantive form of engagement with community organizations and, for community partners, it is hoped that having an expanded role in shaping the course direction will produce public-facing scholarship that is more useful to their existing work.

While three areas of community partnership have been established to engage with the organizing efforts of teachers, students, and place-based communities, each working group will determine the nature of our shared inquiry as a class. At the culmination of the course, a community showcase will be held to celebrate the end of the semester and publicly share the work generated through the course.

Featured

1967 Student Walkout Historical Marker Collective

We are five Juniors at Masterman High School. Our names are Nia Weeks, Tatiana Bennett, Taryn Flaherty, Alison Fortenberry, and Aden Gonzalez. We are working as a team this fall to submit an application for a Pennsylvania historical landmark commemorating the 1967 Black Student Walkout. In the 2018-2019 school year we each competed individually in the National History Day Competition, winning in regionals, states, and for some even nationals. This push for the plaque stems from a learned appreciation for local history and our hope that the state will recognize the role of young people during this time. We feel that those who risked their lives and partook in the walkout deserve recognition for their contribution to the nation’s history.

Ismael Jimenez & the Caucus of Working Educators

A member of the 2016 ABC course, Ismael has been a working educator in the city of Philadelphia for thirteen years. In returning to the course as a community partner, Ismael brings his relationship with both the Caucus of Working educators and the Melanated Educators Collective. Currently, Ismael is co-chair of the Caucus of Working Educators, co-founder of the Philadelphia Black History Collaborative and the Melanated Educators Collective, while being an active participant in several other organizations that seek racial justice in education and across the city of Philadelphia.

Re/member Black Philadelphia

Re/Member Black Philadelphia is a multimodal digital scholarship and community archiving collaboration between the GSE, Penn Libraries, the School District of Philadelphia, and multiple community partner organizations led by Dr. Strong. The project seeks to: (1) document processes of community change and displacement through multimodal storytelling, (2) support community institutions and members in digitally preserving significant historical materials, and (3) engage youth and other community members in place-based, collaborative inquiry.