Dominican Faculty Participating In Nationwide Scholar Strike

Members of Dominican University of California’s faculty are participating in Scholar Strike (#ScholarStrike), a nationwide action and teach-in designed to raise awareness of and prompt action against racism, policing, mass incarceration, and other symptoms of racism's toll in America.

The Dominican faculty are partaking in the teach-in this week through class discussions on issues related to race, social justice, and implicit bias.

 Dr. Katie Lewis, Assistant Professor and Director of the Multiple Subject Credential Program in the Department of Education, will engage her students in discussions focused on anti-racist teaching and Critical Race Theory.

In the “Research for Social Justice” course, graduate students working toward a Master of Science in Education will discuss important topics related to underscoring the urgent importance of addressing racism and injustice in the United States.

“These education graduate students are exploring these principles and concepts as important considerations for conducting research for social justice,” Lewis says.

Discussions will focus on defining anti-racism in educational contexts using excerpts from Kendi's How to be an Antiracist, as well as understanding the Critical Race Theory framework through exploring the history and trajectory, tenets and principles, and research methodologies rooted in this theoretical work. This initial discussion will guide continued conversations about this topic next week.

Lewis also will focus on anti-racist teaching in her “Curriculum & Pedagogy” class.

Dr. Amy Wong, Assistant Professor of English, will have students in Honors “Reading Popular Media,” a Service-Learning course, discuss Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which articulates a "past that is not past" in the wake of the devastation of transatlantic slavery, and Lisa Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents, which demonstrates that Western liberalism and modernity is founded on the labor of black and brown people across the continents of Africa, the Americas, and Asia, as well as on other forms of colonial extraction and exploitation.

Students in Giulia Welch’s “Advance Managements Practices” business course are discussing implicit bias as it relates to race, ethnicity, gender and ability.

“Each student took the Harvard Implicit Bias Test and then wrote a reflection on their results in an open forum,” says Welch, Director of Career Development. “In tomorrow's class we will debrief their reactions and discuss how our bias leads to discrimination in the workplace. Finally will create strategies that they as future managers can leverage to help the organizations they work for be more equitable.”