JSTOR’s Post

Teens in Montana are reimagining their relationship with public spaces – and their communities are benefitting as a result. Last week at the National Humanities Conference in Providence, I learned about a wonderful project where young people restored a local park, incorporating native grasses and deepening connections to their Dakota/Nakota heritage. This is just one example from the nonpartisan Democracy Project, an initiative supported by Humanities Montana. In libraries across the state teens develop, research, iterate, and execute projects to improve their communities. Librarians such as Alia Hanson and Lori Smoker, who both shared stories during the session of what "their" kids have achieved, receive training and support from folks like Jenny Bevill and John Knight from Humanities Montana. Their presentation was full of joy and respect for teens and their energy, drive, perseverance, and collaboration. There are two elements of this initiative that I find most important: first, teens are given complete agency to decide on their project. The librarians help and support but do not direct the projects; and second, the networking and collaboration among librarians with support from Montana Humanities has enabled the program to spread to all four corners of the state. These are not hugely expensive programs to design or run, yet they have enormous impact on the teens involved as well as the communities who benefit from the teens' work. it seems like a no-brainer: every state should be doing this! There was one question mark. Where are the boys? Most of the teens who sign up for the projects are girls. The gender imbalance in civic engagement programs like this one reflects a broader, national pattern of civic disengagement among young men. While teens in The Democracy Project have complete freedom to design their own initiatives--from park restoration to technology solutions-- the challenge lies in getting more young men through the library doors in the first place. Meeting them where they already gather might help. I’m thinking, for instance, that  sports coaches or local veterans might be more effective at recruiting boys than a library flyer alone. Boys might also be swayed if they learn that the program could have practical benefits for themselves, not just their communities, such as that it could help them land a job or improve their college applications.  What other ideas do people have for engaging teen boys in civic life? National Humanities Alliance Federation of State Humanities Councils Rhode Island Council for the Humanities  #studentagency #democracy #pbl #projectbasedlearning

Have you heard of neuro-inclusivity or time-inclusivity? If it was not for Merrilee Proffitt and #OCLCResearch’s #DEI team, I would not have known that there are these angles to our everyday life and work. Other topics ranges from reparative resource description to book bans to accessibility in libraries. If you want to stay up to date with anything IDEA, please subscribe to #Hangingtogther!

Troy University’s College of Communication and Fine Arts (CCFA) has been awarded a $449,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation that will focus on deepening the understanding of Alabama’s cultural identity to foster social justice through research, curriculum development, and community engagement. https://lnkd.in/em-dyWBP

New post from the IDEAs team! This week's roundup of topics includes: In this edition: ✨International Conference of Indigenous Archives Library and Museums; 📗 Library Resources & Technical Services special issue on inclusion, diversity, equity, and access; 🧠 Neuroinclusive program for future librarians. What are you working on or writing about that we should know about or include?

What if we taught history through photographs and diary entries? One VA school is using primary sources (digitized artifacts provided by museums), to teach for example, desegregation. So history comes alive on a classroom rug while using smartboards and textbooks. Our past becomes stories that we explore and investigate, that encourage critical thinking and understanding instead of facts and dates to remember. History becomes humanized and our take away may just be empathy with lessons learned to better our future. https://lnkd.in/dQbjWBi #educationalconsulting https://lnkd.in/gEWFWNNM

Interrupting your Saturday morning with this random "proud mom moment". My son, who just started college has been painting on the side for many years. This past year, he decided to enter his pieces in a few art exhibits. His first attempt led to an honorable mention award at The Bank of the Arts National Juried Exhibition at the Craven Arts Council & Gallery Inc. He's now gotten into two new juried shows, but since he's in college, he isn't able to easily take all his pieces in and out of these museums across the state. So, this is what I was doing on Thursday this week - delivering one of his pieces to the Raleigh Fine Arts Society NC Artists Exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh (CAM). (The Opening Reception is on the 29th if you want to join us!) Meanwhile, he's at college randomly digging into reproductive rights court proceedings from the library on his spare time and taking poli sci and art classes as the formal parts of his education. And to turn this into an "official" LinkedIn post using the common expected template, here's what you can take away from this, other than me being super proud of him: The formal part of your education (your degree, certificate, and other formal training) serves a good foundation to provide grounding, frameworks, and referencing. But what leads to success from the perspective of life and work satisfaction are all the informal learning activities you do to: - lean into your interests, - strengthen and share your gifts, - explore the application of that formal education, - stretch and challenge yourself to try new things, - put yourself out there - share your interests with others - receive feedback about your work - develop and join communities with folks who have similar interests Who knows where this will lead him. One thing I know is that we never push or expect our kids to turn their interests into monetization opportunities. You don't need to turn every interest into a profession. Sometimes it turns out that way simply by not adding more expectations to the things we love. Sometimes we keep it as a thing we love doing with no other strings involved. #RandomSaturdayThoughts

In librarianship and academia, the word "attract" often pops up in our efforts to diversify our institutions. But as Ruha Benjamin insightfully points out in Viral Justice, the issue isn't that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students aren't already attracted to fields like STEM—it's that they're systematically undermined and excluded at every turn. This isn't just a STEM problem; it's a pervasive issue across higher education and library systems. We must shift our focus from "attracting" diverse groups to actively dismantling the barriers that repel them. Whether it's through revising biased policies, ensuring equitable access to resources, or creating truly inclusive environments. #Librarianship #DiversityInSTEM #AcademicLibraries #Inclusion #EquityInEducation

Michelle Cheon for Yale Daily News reports that Thomas Allen Harris, a professor at Yale University, has been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a documentary titled My Mother, The Scientist. This film will explore the challenges Black scientists face, both historically and today. Harris, who has dedicated his career to using storytelling for advocacy, believes that the underrepresentation of Black individuals in STEM fields needs to be addressed. His own experience as a Black student at Harvard University, where he noticed the lack of diversity, inspired his earlier works and this current project. The documentary will feature the stories of Black scientists, including Harris' own mother, and aims to combat stereotypes about who belongs in science and technology fields. The documentary also includes a national outreach campaign called Scientists in the Family, which focuses on raising awareness about the importance of representation and culturally responsive teaching in STEM. Harris and his team hope the film will inspire students of color by showing them that people like them have made significant contributions to science, despite facing systemic barriers. Harris believes that sharing these stories will help fight “stereotype threat” and encourage more Black students to pursue careers in STEM. My Mother, The Scientist is set to be released in 2025 through theatrical screenings, PBS broadcasts, and streaming platforms. #ThomasAllenHarris #STEM #BlackScientists #RepresentationMatters #Documentary #STEMEducation #Yale #YouBelongInSTEM #STEMForAll https://lnkd.in/ggihPfmA

The always thoughtful Greg Lukianoff (president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) on "How to Save Free Speech on Campus". Well ... as the subtitle of his essay states: "To start, schools should seek out scholars over activists." For those of us committed to the mission of universities as knowledge-seeking institutions, the rash of cancelled talks, targeting of academics expressing "wrong-think", and deplatforming speakers points to a deep malaise within our educational institutions. We have not arrived at this point via accident. Lukianoff notes: "... higher education created this problem by favoring applicants [staff] who are interested only, or primarily, in engaging in activism. Indeed, they made activism a part of their marketing and recruitment materials." Some within the academic community are perfectly happy with this state of affairs, as it reflects their political leanings and the success of their long march through the institutions. But others, like me, are worried. Few in this camp are prepared to speak out, it seems (for reasons already mentioned). At any rate, talking publicly about the mission and nature of our universities should be a major topic for our policy makers, academics, and the wider community. One of the consequences of the focus on "activism" is that it can shift the nature and aptitude of the university community, where moral certainty shrouds a commitment to deep intellectual inquiry. As Lukianoff explains: "Right now, many students enroll with a predetermined moral and political certainty and an intolerance for dissent—and schools largely encourage and reinforce it. Indeed, there isn’t much difference between asking students how determined of an activist they are and asking them how many issues they consider essentially settled." "... given the fact that modern social justice activism tends to combine disparate causes into one larger intersectional whole, being a social justice activist can mean that you are certain on an awful lot of moral, historical, philosophical, and even scientific issues." The consequence of "[t]his plague of certainty" is the "rejection of free speech, academic freedom, and free inquiry in the very places that are meant to be strongholds for them." Lukianoff proposes some steps to address these concerns, such as: "Recruiting students focused on academics more than activism is important. But schools should prioritize free speech values in hiring. They must implement robust training for administrators, resident advisers, and student government members in the radical open-mindedness and intellectual humility of the scholarly mindset." With this in mind, one thing that could be much more openly discussed here in #Australia is how, and to what extent, the commitment to "social justice" may have had a corrosive impact upon the integrity, trust and mission of our universities. A highly-recommended essay! #freespeech #actvisim #socialjustice

I am proud to share that my dissertation on activist scholars is now available. My narrative study offers insight into some of the incredible scholarship approaches by faculty of color across research intensive institutions and reminds us how powerful scholarship can be when it stubbornly seeps from the ivory walls into minoritized communities. My study also identifies ten characteristics to be used as a guideline for fostering and rewarding activist leaning scholarship, inviting us to break from traditional academic reward systems. My dissertation titled, "ACTIVIST SCHOLARS: FACULTY OF COLOR NAVIGATING INSTITUTIONAL REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS," can be found on this link: https://lnkd.in/g2RRqNgs.