How can and do communities productively respond to expressions of
hate, violence, and human rights violations?  The course will be
organized into three thematic units:  Youth Violence, Literature and
Social Justice, and Storytelling as Social Conscience.  The first
unit, Youth Violence, will focus on coming-of-age stories and the
racial coding of violence in the United States.  In this unit,
students will explore:  a) the relationship between the spread of
violence in our culture and representations of violence in the media;
b)  coming-of-age narratives of the urban working class, which
legitimate violence as a way to define identity, and c)  coming-of-age
narratives of the white middle-class that speak to the restructuring
of white ethnicity and white youth and despair.  Texts under
consideration include Luis Rodriguez's Always Running; Henry Giroux's
Fugitive Cultures:  Race, Violence, and Youth; and juvenile literature
that counteracts youth violence and commemorates the lives of innocent
victims.  This unit will also include films that depict the alienation
of white youth and the crisis of white masculinity, such as River's
Edge and American History X, and black film productions of black youth
violence that depict a culture of nihilism rooted in violence defined
by hopelessness, social decay, and poverty, such as Boyz in the Hood
and Juice.

The second unit, "Literature and Social Justice," will focus on the
literature of dissent and social activism at key historical moments in
American History.  We will read works that urge communities to respond
to hate, violence, and systematic discrimination through non-violent
means, such as the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry David
Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience", Ida B. Well's autobiography "The
Crusade for Justice," Morris Dees Jr. "A Season for Justice," and
publications from organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law
Center and Amnesty International, among others.

The third unit, "Storytelling as Social Conscience," will focus on the
role that autobiography and diary-writing has and continues to play in
the fight against social injustice.  Students will participate in a
letter exchange project and a series of verbal dialogues with students
at Bloomington North High School and Aurora Alternative High School.
The writing project and dialogues take as their model the inspiring
work of a teacher and her students at Wilson High School in Long
Beach, CA, who undertook a consciousness-raising odyssey against
racism and violence through an experiential curriculum.  The college
and high school students involved in this course will read, write, and
talk about Wilson High School students' experiences published in The
Freedom Writer's Diary and use their book as a model for the creation
of their own public text, reading, and performance.