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Nneka’s comments challenged the adequacy of lectures, symposia, and seminars,
upon which faculty members typically depend for scholarly dialogue, as venues
for meaningfully engaging students. In these settings, where undergraduate students
are typically marginalized, if not entirely ignored, by presentations assuming
a specialist’s level of knowledge, faculty members dominate discussion
and set a forbiddingly high standard for the right to talk. As a consequence,
few students dare to join in follow-up questions and comments from the audience,
and most are reduced to passive consumers. Project 500, on the other hand, fully
engaged students as creators, organizers, and audience. (Chapter
1) |
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Event organizers and participants invited students in particular to carry on
the social justice work that culminated in Brown. The ethnographers
reported that Brown year student audiences were defined in contradictory
ways: their generation was both inactive on civil rights issues, and capable
of changing the future. These definitional differences led to two modes of address:
the first, assuming the current generation was politically inactive, apathetic,
or disaffected, charged it with forsaking its social responsibility; the second,
believing its student audience was the hope of the future and that it desired
justice, called it the beacon for change. In some events, speakers combined both
modes of address: on those occasions, students would first hear that they were
guilty of shrugging off the mantle of history and forgetting the struggles of
the past, and then hear exhortations to right injustices of the present and future. (Chapter
2) |
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