Marcia Chatelain was shocked when she heard the news that an unarmed black man had been shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. And when she learned that the violent protests that followed had prompted local school officials to cancel the first day of classes, she knew she needed to do something.
For someone whose life had revolved around the academic calendar, the thought that children would be starting the year confused, scared, and trying to make sense of a tragedy spinning out of control spurred her to action.
She used social media to turn a syllabus into a tool for social justice.
An associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University, she contacted her colleagues on Twitter and urged them to talk with their students. She also asked them to join her in compiling a reading list that could help them all make sense of the unfolding events.
“On the first day of school, we usually go over the syllabus for the semester, but what if we used the energy and excitement people have on that first day to start thinking about some of these big problems facing our nation? How do we make meaning from day one?”
The result was the #FergusonSyllabus, a multidisciplinary, crowdsourced reading list that came together in days and evolved over the coming weeks.
The people who made a mark on higher education — for better or worse.
Two years later, the idea that a syllabus can be a tool for social justice is now ingrained in how academics respond to a national crisis or flash point. The syllabus she started has inspired other scholars to quickly mobilize with hashtags and a catalog of educational materials. “It was a way to remind people that even when we’re overwhelmed by the world’s problems, we do have a lot of tools in front of us, and they come out of the topics we study and the conversations we have among our colleagues,” says Ms. Chatelain, 37.
For Ferguson, history professors contributed readings about the history of race relations while chemistry professors posted information about how tear gas affects the human body. Architecture professors offered information about city planning and sprawl, and music professors, about protest songs.
The success of the Ferguson syllabus prompted scholars to turn to crowdsourcing in subsequent national tragedies. Among them was the June 2015 killings of nine black people who were gunned down by a white supremacist in a Charleston, S.C., church.
Chad Williams, an associate professor of African and African-American studies at Brandeis University, started the #CharlestonSyllabus hashtag with a few of his colleagues. He says he was inspired by the Ferguson syllabus, which he considered “a vital tool for educators throughout the world to learn about the myriad issues at the core of Ferguson and apply them to the classroom.”
A year later, the #OrlandoSyllabus and #PulseOrlandoSyllabus quickly came to life in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida.
And while it’s debatable whether Donald J. Trump’s election triggered a national crisis, it didn’t take long for versions of the “TrumpSyllabus” to take off.
By posting such materials on social media, the way Ms. Chatelain did after Ferguson, scholars are making important interdisciplinary readings available to a wide audience, says Judy Lubin, an adjunct professor of sociology at Howard University who is co-founder of a group called Sociologists for Justice.
“Marcia’s work was an inspiration for professors and advocates as crises have come up,” Ms. Lubin says. “By making these resources available to broader audiences, they don’t end up getting lost, just another academic footnote.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
