Abstract

Transgressing Borders: Reimagining Education and the Role of Learning in Community is a multi-day workshop and festival aimed at reimagining asset-based community-campus partnerships. In the spirit of The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts’s vision for limitless imaginings, and drawing on the work of educator and activist bell hooks, this community learning experience will act as a bridge and a public classroom for diverse community members across social locations and local higher education institutions. Participants will engage in “meaningful dialogue” in an effort to foster a sense of belonging to explore, as a Hudson Valley community, the concept of education as the practice of freedom. We aspire to transgress campus-community barriers to center epistemic justice, experiential knowledge, relationship-building, and critical inquiry. The Office of Community Engaged Learning is partnering with SUNY New Paltz’s Social Justice Education program to create an incubator for place-based knowledge holders and formal educators to reimagine education through intergenerational and intercultural learning connections.

In our departments’ combined academic knowledge, research, and practices of Critical Community Engaged Learning, Social Justice Education, and Engaged Pedagogy, we aim to build a learning ecosystem that centers authentic knowledge-sharing by situating community experts as thought partners alongside academic leaders. The program proposal aligns with the Institute’s goals of creating a public classroom for academic and place-based experts to cultivate relationships through learning, action, and reflection around six crucial themes and contemporary challenges (Education, Health & Wellness, Affordable Housing, Food Justice & Access, Legal and Financial Literacy, and the Arts).

Through vision similar to the work of other academic institutions like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, the Brooklyn College Listening Project, and Imagining America’s National Gathering, this unique programming, supported by The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts, will demonstrate what it means for higher education to create spaces for meaningful dialogue and reimagine public scholarship that engages and uplifts the community. Our hope is to identify and address local impact-issues through academic inquiry and collaborative projects.