Unusual Programs is an occasional collection from The Dialog U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to instructing.
Title after all:
Crossing the Divide
What prompted the concept for the course?
I developed the concept for this course in 2016 throughout an Amtrak writing residency program. I spent over two weeks crisscrossing america by way of practice whereas engaged on my 2021 ebook concerning the French Nationwide Railways and World Warfare II. After binge-watching the nation and gabbing with strangers, I knew the practice could be the good classroom. I wrote some articles about its worth for Smithsonian journal.
The rising polarization and the then-upcoming U.S. presidential election made Might 2024 the right time to ask graduate college students finding out peace, battle and justice to hitch me.
College students visited the sixteenth Road Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
John Coletti
What does the course discover?
College students met two instances on the Kroc College of Peace Research throughout the College of San Diego to debate our forthcoming two-week journey’s scheduled stops and assignments, which would come with speaking with strangers, totally different readings, conserving a journal and producing particular person blogs.
We rode Amtrak trains between states and rented vans to maneuver about inside states. We departed from San Diego’s Previous City Transit Heart, heading first to Los Angeles to go to Homeboy Industries, the most important gang rehabilitation program. Then, over the course of two weeks, we stopped in Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Washington D.C., visiting locations that reduce throughout numerous divides: crimson and blue, eco-friendly and pro-fossil gas, in addition to city and rural populations. On the practice, we acquired to know one another, made new pals, watched the passing panorama, learn, and wrote in our journals.
We then visited Patagonia, Arizona, a 900-person city that has the present of being one of the biologically numerous ecosystems within the USA and the curse of resting atop important minerals about to be extracted for nationwide safety. Ecologists say the mining extraction venture, often called the Hermosa venture, will probably have a major adverse influence on the world’s water provide and endangered species within the area, in addition to residents residing close to the manganese processing plant.
After 26 hours on the practice, we arrived in Houston. There we visited the Houston Museum of Pure Science to grasp how the petroleum business explains – or doesn’t talk about – its function in local weather change. In New Orleans, we visited the Whitney Plantation, a nonprofit museum on the positioning of a former slave plantation. This museum tries to teach guests concerning the South’s historical past from the attitude of the enslaved. We additionally studied the jail situations at Louisiana State Penitentiary, the place incarcerated individuals interact in bodily dangerous compelled labor.
In Birmingham, Alabama, we attended a church service on the sixteenth Road Baptist Church, made well-known by the 1963 bombing by white supremacists that killed 4 women. In Montgomery, Alabama, we visited the Legacy of Slavery Museum and a lynching memorial.
We resulted in Washington, D.C., the place we visited the Nationwide Archives, which homes the U.S. Structure, the Declaration of Independence and the Invoice of Rights.
In between our stops, we frolicked on the practice speaking to strangers and getting a way of the nation’s huge panorama – each politically and geographically. We additionally made a brief video concerning the journey.
The category stops in Houston alongside its two-week, cross-country tour.
Tony Campos, CC BY
Why is that this course related now?
In line with the Pew Analysis Heart, the American public stays extra deeply and bitterly politically polarized than at any time up to now twenty years. There was a rise in each “ideological polarization,” which means political disagreement, in addition to “affective polarization,” an elevated antipathy and animosity towards others with whom we disagree. Some folks concern that these divides can lead the nation into civil warfare and ultimately trigger democracy to fail.
I needed to discover with college students simply how polarized the nation felt. I additionally needed us to react to this polarization by reaching out to others, somewhat than recoiling.
What’s a important lesson from the course?
Once we depend on our smartphones and televisions to inform us about our nation, it’s simple to turn into afraid and withdraw from public life and to keep away from strangers. We did the alternative and located many great folks in addition to many challenges, similar to torturous, compelled jail labor, resistance throughout the fossil gas business to acknowledge or reply to its function in local weather change, the difficultly of safely extracting important minerals from fragile ecosystems, and tensions over what U.S. youngsters will study concerning the nation’s historic observe of slavery.
What supplies does the course characteristic?
What is going to the course put together college students to do?
I would like the course to assist college students really feel extra assured partaking with strangers and exploring connection, as an alternative of assuming distinction. Additionally they turn into higher versed in a few of the challenges of our time – together with local weather change, mining impacts, racial divides, legacies of slavery – in addition to approaches to addressing these conflicts. They discovered search out totally different views and embrace complexity with out turning into immobilized. A number of college students devoted their remaining capstone venture to exploring extra deeply the mining impacts in Patagonia, Arizona, and assembly with stakeholders to seek out methods to reduce the environmental influence of this mining work.