Toward a Humanist and Agentic Paradigm of Inclusive Teaching—Lessons from the United States Civil Rights Era for College Pedagogy

By Bryan M. Dewsbury

This essay is based on an invited keynote address that ISSOTL graciously asked me to give in 2023. In it, I recentralize a view of education and its inherent power that has its roots in some of the United States and the world’s most powerful social movements. I specifically reflect on the legacy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the principles of active listening, building trust and contextual learning that guided their work. The late Robert Moses articulates this clearly in his book Radical Equations how his work as a youth organizer in SNCC informed his pedagogy and the founding of the still-running Algebra Project.

In so doing, Robert Moses and SNCC continued the tradition of so many thinkers and teachers before them who understood education’s enduring power to both create mental freedom and to tether a nation’s citizens as equal participants to the governance of the society in which they live. In the evolution of SoTL as a mechanism toward pedagogical improvement and consequently student success, I hope this essay reminds us of the humanist aims of equity-minded education. Transcending the important yet insufficient goals of technical preparation, a humanity-minded pedagogy embraces the potential of education to generate more powerful outcomes than knowledge acquisition. The value of these aspirations need not be evident only when society is navigating its darkest fissures. They should be paramount to the case institutions of higher education continue to make as to why they are critically important for a well-informed, civically engaged and socially just national society.

Read the TLI article here.

Moses, Robert, and Charles E. Cobb. 2002. Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. Beacon Press.