Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

You can study justice in many college classes. You can philosophize, you can examine how societies in the past have been just (or unjust), but this course allows you to develop the tools to make the world more just and put them to work. In SJ210, we learn about social movements and consider what justice looks and feels like, but we focus on making our immediate world more just. Students in this class typically build a personal toolkit for a project of interest to them and work collaboratively on a class project to make PCC more just. Previous students have focused on supporting housing-insecure students on campus, reducing sexual violence, and building a curriculum that matters more to students. At the end of this course, you will have increased your understanding of how to ethically participate in society, as well as a sense of how your experience fits into the history of social movements. 

This class is part of the Social Justice Focus Award.

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

1. Analyze strategies and tactics of contemporary and historical social justice movements to gain understandings of how social justice movements achieve change.
2. Apply strategies and interdisciplinary understanding of systems of power, privilege, and domination including the personal, social, cultural, economic, and political consequences to develop a direct action project.
3. Use audience-appropriate written and spoken communication to critique structures of power and oppression and their impact on communities, the environment, and society.
4. Complete a collaborative social justice direct action project.

Increase student knowledge of and engagement in large and small scale political processes that affect our their lives, both in the community and on campus.

Class meeting time consists of lecture, collaborative projects, and large and small group discussion. Meeting time may also include the following: writing; viewing DVDs or online sources; listening to guest speakers; community-engagement. Students ultimately collaborate on a whole-class project, which is enacted before the end of the quarter.

The SAC leaves specific assessment strategies to the instructor, but assumes that a variety of formative assessments will be used to test student learning throughout the term. The SAC also encourages the integration of the following kinds of tasks into the course to assess student achievement of course outcomes in a more comprehensive and holistic manner:

1. Short analytical or application papers on specific concepts, themes, and issues

2. Term or research papers, using a variety of research strategies

3. Oral presentations

4. Group research, analysis, and presentation projects

5. Class participation in full-class discussions and small groups or teams.

6. Response papers or journals reflecting on life experiences, events, perspectives of lecturers, and social phenomena.

7. Participant observation or work in a social movement or group working on relevant social issues

8. Student-instructor conferences

9. Portfolios

10. Video projects

11. Oral histories and interviews

1. Multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives related to the study of social movements and related processes of social change, in the United States and globally

2. Interdisciplinary research and methods appropriate to the study of social change and social movements

3. Cultural issues relevant to the study of social issues and movements, with particular attention to multiculturalism and diversity

4. Social stratification and systems of inequality-including social class, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, gender and age-with respect to the social issues studied

5. Social structure and organizational issues with respect to the issues and movements studied

6. The interface of the major social institutions and social change with respect to the issues and movements studied, from a multidisciplinary perspective