Community Colleges and the Future of the Humanities

This session will discuss an alternative retention model for community colleges implemented in the Peer Activist Learning Community (PALC), a faculty-led, peer-supported project at LaGCC. Inspired by Stetsenko’s Transformative Activist Stance (2016), PALC seeks to transform transmission-type, utilitarian educational practices, while spuring agentive learning through critical-theoretical pedagogy (Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011) wherein critical concepts in the social sciences/humanities are learned as analytical tools for (a) promoting critical engagement with knowledge, disclosing its competing and often contradictory ethical-political underpinnings while simultaneously (b) facilitating a stance on community and institutional practices in the college and the wider world, to contest the status quo. Framed within critical theoretical readings, discussions connect, contextualize, and transform students' conceptualization of educational practices as they share their struggles with courses and with connecting college learning with their aspirations and participation in community practices. This process bridges students’ learning goals and overall life pursuits and positions them as active contributors to a curriculum that addresses their thematic universe (Freire, 1970). As they negotiate diverse discourses and positions toward social issues and practices, students gain confidence to challenge and transform the power dynamics in pedagogical research and to contest the imposition of academic knowledge that perpetuates passivity and oppression.