This year Xavier rolls out a new core curriculum designed to give students more options to pursue their interests and to explore the breadth of a liberal arts education. While the overall core curriculum hours have been reduced, several new categories of core classes have given faculty an opportunity to create exciting new courses, several of which employ engaged pedagogy, civic-engagement outcomes, and service-learning.
At the 1000 level, two new categories, the Xavier Experience and the New Orleans Experience, offer students unique opportunities to explore themes of Xavier's historic mission within the context of New Orleans and the particular social and economic histories of the communities that make up the city. While the categories are distinct in that one focuses on concepts of social justice and the other on reading New Orleans as text, they also overlap in that both ask students to think critically about connections between their education, their professional goals, and their communities. Xavier and its purpose as a place of learning for many future doctors and scientists, many from historically underserved populations, are not separate from, but rather are a part of, New Orleans and its history of socioeconomic segregation and oppression. It's impossible to think of the history and success of Xavier without the context of the bitter struggle to integrate New Orleans schools in the 1950s and '60s, and the lasting effects of redlining and selective economic neglect that mark the city's poorest neighborhoods today. While Xavier has been noted as an engine of socioeconomic mobility, as in this study from 2017, New Orleans as a whole remains a hub of multigenerational poverty, as revealed in this 2018 report on "income diversity" in which New Orleans ranked 51st out of 60 large cities.
These courses in and of themselves may do little to close this gap, as I've written in the past about the limits of service-learning. But while many of the students will go on to live and work in other communities, many others will live and work in New Orleans, and in this regard, these courses can absolutely make a difference. For some of the students, addressing the city's needs in health care, education, housing, and employment will become their life's work. And these students may look back on the connections drawn in these courses between their education and their community as a major step stone along their path, if not their starting block.
Below are titles and descriptions of some of these courses:
FREEDOM DREAMS: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE AFRICAN
AMERICAN IMAGINATION
Social justice in the African American imagination looks at the historical, ideological, and literary expressions of black liberation throughout their history in the US. We will seek to answer the question: How have people of African descent expressed their dreams for freedom, justice, and equality throughout their history in the US? We will answer this question by examining themes and movements, such as: African American acts of resistance, Black Christianity, African American emancipation, black anticolonialism and Negritude, black feminism, Black Power, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the historically black college and university.
COMMUNICATING SOCIAL JUSTICE
Communicating Social Justice examines selected social justice issues (theme to vary
each semester) in relation to communication activism. Using interdisciplinary
approaches, students will analyze the history, theory, and practice of communication activism. Students participate in a series of communication-based activities. Whenever possible, the course incorporates a service-learning project that directly engages students in a communication activism campaign.
PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF MARDI GRAS
Students will get hands-on and go behind the scenes to develop a deeper
understanding of diverse Mardi Gras practices and the corporations, cottage industries, professional and amateur artists, and clubs, krewes, gangs, and tribes that produce the Mardi Gras events that help New Orleanians celebrate traditions as well as drawing tourists from all over the world. In this context, students will conduct their own interview research to explore questions of Mardi Gras and parading culture participants' understanding of their roles as artists, producers, and consumers.
HOMELESSNESS IN NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans is one of many cities featuring a significant and visible homeless
population. Working from the premise that homelessness represents both a personal “trouble” and a public “issue”, this service- learning course will give students the opportunity to study the multi-faceted causes and consequences of homelessness in New Orleans. We will work to understand homelessness as not only a condition, but as a social concept and process, including its meaning in other U.S. and global contexts. Through service, reflection, discussion, selected readings, data analysis, and guest speakers, students will learn about and reflect upon a range of individual and collective choices and actions that might reduce homelessness. Students enrolled in this course should be prepared for trips off campus outside class time and be eager to serve and to engage in a respectful manner individuals at service learning sites.