The Nashman Center is sponsoring a very special talk by Tania Mitchell at next week’s GW Diversity Summit, Friday, November 13, 2-3pm, Register Here (NOTE: this is an updated link).
Dr. Tania Mitchell is an internationally recognized scholar in community engagement and higher education. She also happens to live just blocks from where George Floyd was murdered. She experienced that event, and the activism that followed, from the perspective of both a community member and a scholar of community engagement. In her talk, she will share that unique intersection of perspectives with us, along with the lessons that can inform our next steps as citizens and educators.
Throughout her career, Mitchell has challenged higher education to do better. The conversations catalyzed by her work have shaped the community engagement field for the last 15 years. Her 2008 article, “Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models“ launched a paradigm shift in how community engagement in higher education is discussed. “Critical service-learning” entered the lexicon, and sparked local and global discussions about the intentionality needed to engage service-learning students in critical examination of power and the inequity that is built-in to our social systems.
In 2012, Mitchell challenged us to further examine our work with her study, “Service Learning as a Pedagogy of Whiteness.” In this work, Mitchell and co-authors called on faculty to examine their own biases, assumptions, and practices to disrupt instruction techniques that, consciously or not, reinforce white privilege.
Bringing Dr. Mitchell to GW would be an important opportunity to stir our own conversations on these issues in any case. But her talk next week will be a unique one given recent events, which she sums up with the phrase, “multiple pandemics.”
If you are interested in her more recent work, allow us to also recommend:
- Mitchell, T. D. & Latta, M. (2020). From critical community service to critical service learning and the futures we must (still) imagine. Journal of Community Engagement in Higher Education, 12(1), 3-6.
- Mitchell, T. D., Rost-Banik, C., & Battistoni, R. M. (2019). Civic agency and political engagement: Community engagement’s enduring influence. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.
