Session Abstract - Katya Gibel Mevorach

Session Abstract - Katya Gibel Mevorach
Community Participation

For this session, undergraduates are presumed to be current and future “community activists” and therefore educating liberal arts college students remains an important task as they are an important target audience for cultivating interdisciplinary consciousness. I identified insights gained from a collaborative teaching experiment last semester with a molecular biologist, a course titled “Racing Through Genes”  including a heightened awareness of the impact disciplinary training has on teaching expectations; generational differences in terms of racialized knowledge and experiences, the challenge of miscommunication and the tension between everyday words and their deployment as concepts such as ancestry, community, and population. Among the questions I addressed are how to meet the challenge of historical amnesia about racial classifications and the efficacy of racial criteria to undermine race-based discrimination?  Collaborative teaching is one strategy for both modeling for, and helping, students bridge the often frustrating gap between academic theory in the classroom and contradicting experiences – exemplified, for instance, by the impact of the Minority Health and Health Disparity Research and Education Act of 2000.

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