Author of Student Development and Social Justice​​​​​​​

Can you give us an overview of your work in academia thus far?

After a decade in the civil rights and social justice non-profit world, I joined academia 13 years ago when I taught my first class at Pitzer College, a small, private, liberal arts college that is part of the well-known seven Claremont College consortium. The class I taught initially, research methods for community change, is the same class that I teach today, among many others related to critical community studies, healing and social justice, and prison education. Within my first two years at Pitzer, I was asked to become the director of the community engagement center, in addition to teaching community engagement courses. I am now embarking on my 11th year as faculty director of the community engagement center although I also now direct two other centers, one that is based directly in our local community of Ontario, CA and operates as a hub for community-based research and service learning called CASA, critical action and social advocacy, and the other is a center that forwards a number of academic initiatives shared across the Claremont Colleges called OCAC, the office for consortium academic collaboration. In addition to directing these three centers, I also teach in our CASA Program as well as in our Inside-Out Prison Exchange program, which brings incarcerated and campus students together for a semester-long, credit-bearing class inside a local men’s prison. I deeply enjoy straddling my roles between administrator, teacher, and community practitioner. I also enjoy the interdisciplinary approach I have been trained in (my BA was in Sociology and Psychology, and my MA and PhD are both in Cultural Studies), which inspires the way I think, teach, and engage daily.

How did you identify the need for a book focusing on community-campus partnerships and student development?

I first realize the need for academia to focus on its connection to community-campus partnerships and student development when I, myself, was a student. I had definitive personal development experiences through a number of social justice trainings and workshops I was a part of in high school. Those areas of social justice activism and the correlating consciousness-raising and personal development that resulted from them always occurred outside of school hours and thus I separated them from my education, creating a false binary between activism and academia. This continued for me in college, as well, in that my greatest experiences of learning about social justice, culture, community building, activism, and myself on personal, political, professional levels all occurred outside of school, primarily while I was studying abroad and also when I took time off from college in order to work with local community-based organizations in my neighborhood. When I graduated college and began working in nonprofit organizations dedicated to civil rights and social justice, we had no interactions with local universities. This constant disconnect between social justice, community and higher education just bewildered me and so I focused my dissertation as a graduate student and my subsequent career in teaching and administration on intentionally integrating these worlds.

Did you find it especially important to focus on social justice in the service-learning setting? If so, why?

While I think we can learn a great deal from traditional lecture-based classrooms, I know from my research, personal experience, and role as a teacher that students learn deeply through hands-on, experiential and interactive learning. Furthermore, critical reflection and theoretical frameworks that connect the classroom with engaged learning in the community allow us to more deeply understand the root conditions of injustice that lead to many of the surface problems and social services that aim to ameliorate them. It is critical to have a social justice framework to service learning so that students can study the larger structures and dominant narratives that frame issues of injustice and oppression. Without this, students can unwittingly enter into communities that are wrestling with poverty, gangs, violence, underachieving schools, or high rates of incarceration and blame individuals for being in these predicaments without recognizing the macro systemic and structural issues that have created the root conditions that result in these realities. Without students being aware of their own positionalities and identities, they may find it harder to see their own biases or ignorances, and/or their own personal wounding from injustice. There is a level of self-awareness one needs to respectfully and ethically cross bridges of differences between different communities, while being open to areas of shared values and beliefs. Social justice frameworks also remind students that their engagement is reciprocal and that communities that may be devastated by injustice, poverty, violence or other kinds of suffering also have a great many assets within them and have much to teach students rather than seeing being seen solely as a recipient of charity.

What are some ways that instructors and students can ensure that their community involvement is more socially just?

Luckily, I think there are a number of ways that professors, classes, and students engaged in service learning can ensure that their community-campus partnerships are more just and equitable. They can be thoughtful about the ways in which they initially become proximate to one another, utilizing interlocutors that know both communities and can introduce them to each other, taking time to build relationships of trust so that each side of the equation has a chance to recognize the value, the knowledge, the cultural assets and strengths of each other. Entering into a partnership recognizing the need for reciprocity, equal and mutual benefits of the partnership, relinquishing individual agendas and looking for shared goals, and keeping each other accountable for the progress and relationship, action, learning, research or whatever other outcome may be intended. Students can advance this work by educating themselves about the communities they intend to engage with, attempting to understand the larger structural issues that pertain to the work of the partnering organization, and maintain a practice of critical reflection and contemplative inquiry throughout the process of engagement. Keeping in mind how we can move beyond or at least connect social service to social change is also a way to advance a social justice agenda in community engagement work. Open communication, self-awareness, relationship-building, flexibility, mutual accountability, shared learning and teaching, respect for the different epistemologies, expectations, cultural norms and ideas in the room – all of these are key ingredients for fostering a just and equitable partnership.

How do you hope your research has real world impact?

My most recent book, Student Development and Social Justice: Critical Learning, Radical Healing and Community Engagement, published last year by Palgrave, brings together the last twenty years of my work as a social justice and community engagement student, teacher, administrator, researcher and practitioner. I wrote this book based on my own research and experience around effective and respectful community- campus partnerships, community-based research and engagement pathways that are framed by social justice. I hope that others who come to this work can find benefit in it no matter what their role is. It aims to speak to students, teachers, administrators and community partners, giving tangible activities to engage in for personal reflection as well as tools for cultivating critical, contemplative community-campus partnerships. There are sample syllabi, frameworks for assessing community-campus partnerships, activities to do in classes, homework assignments and readings to suggest, as well as personal critical reflection prompts. All of this I hope will make the book a tangible guide to impact real change in our day-to-day work for community-campus partnerships. I hope it infuses higher education with a greater commitment to include interactive, engaged learning with communities as a key component of one’s rigorous academic experience. I hope it honors the tremendous knowledge, value, and innovation that communities have when they are working in equal partnership for social change. I also hope it helps people connect their own personal journeys for transformation and healing to our collective efforts for social change, peace and justice.

About the author

Tessa Hicks Peterson is Assistant Vice President for Community Engagement and Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Pitzer College, USA. For the last twenty years she has facilitated trainings and taught classes on anti-bias education, social justice, and community engagement. She is the author of several articles on community engagement and social change.