Institute on Race and Ethnicity- Category B (Curriculum Development)

Ahmed Mbalia, UW-Milwaukee
Jolanda Sallmann and Judith Martin, UW-Green Bay
Kristin Vespia, UW-Green Bay
Susan Johnson, UW-Madison

Ahmed Mbalia, Department of Africology, UW-Milwaukee - "The Quest for Pan-Africanism."
The proposed course, which will be conducted in a seminar format, will provide students with an understanding of Africa's potential role in global relations in the 21st century. In that light, the course will critique the recent decision by the independent African nations to form an African Unification Front to organize for Pan-Africanism - a United States of Africa.
Accordingly, the curriculum will explore the history of the Pan-African movement. The political, economic and social reality of the African continent will also be discussed. The issues of gender, race and class as critical factors in any model for unification will be examined. Finally, the curriculum will critique the impact of a United States of Africa on global issues - economically, politically and socially.

Jolanda Sallmann and Judith Martin, Social Work Professional Program, UW-Green Bay - "(A) Understanding Diversity, Challenging Oppression: A Service Learning Course for Helping Professionals (undergraduate), and (B) Practice Competence in a Diverse Community (graduate)."
The first course is intended to prepare students considering the helping professions to become culturally competent practitioners through learning about diversity and critically analyzing multiple forms of oppression from a "multicentered" perspective. Students will be required to engage in three hours of volunteer work per week in an organization that serves communities of color. The first part of the course will focus on increasing students' self-awareness and knowledge of social oppression. They will start by learning about the dimensions of diversity related to a particular issue and then about its corresponding oppression, including exploring strategies for change. The second part will examine specific social problems students are encountering in their placements and targeted strategies for inducing social change.
The second course is an advanced practice course intended to provide graduate students in social work with an understanding of the lived experiences of a broad range of historically oppressed groups and a variety of intervention strategies and approaches for conducting culturally competent social work practices. The first part of the class will provide an overview of theoretical frameworks for understanding diversity, privilege, and oppression within the context of social work practice. Next, it will examine strategies to be used in practice settings for confronting ageism, sexism, heterosexism, and the stigma associated with mental illness and addiction. The last section will focus on specific diversity frameworks for providing culturally competent care. Special attention will be given to examining interventions at the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels of practice.

Kristin Vespia Department of Human Development, UW-Green Bay - "Psych 440 Multicultural Counseling and Mental Health."
In this upper-level psychology course, students will learn about how mental health and illness are defined and treated across cultures. In a broader sense, the course will address the ways in which privilege, oppression, and an increasingly diverse society influence the provision of health (and mental health) care and human services in general. Students will develop knowledge about specific cultural groups, including their worldviews, characteristics, and perspectives on mental health/illness. They will be challenged to examine their own attitudes and beliefs and how these factors could impact their work with people from other cultures.

Susan Johnson, Chicana/o Studies, and Tyina Steptoe, Department of History, UW-Madison - "Chicana/o Studies 330: In Search of the Multiracial West: Westward Along the Santa Fe Trail."
This short-session course will take approximately thirty-six graduate and undergraduate students by bus from Madison to Texas and the Southwest in June 2005. The course will focus on issues of race and ethnicity in the U.S. West and, in particular, will highlight the complexity and diversity of the western past and the deep historical roots of contemporary struggles for civil rights and social justice. It will blend traditional classroom learning with the opportunity to visit the sites of history and experience first-hand how events in the past continue to shape the present. The course will consist of one week of classroom work in Madison and fourteen days on the bus. The initial classroom work will include readings and lectures designed to provide the necessary historical background for the sites to be visited and the issues to be discussed en route. The bus will serve as a moving classroom where students listen to faculty lectures, read assigned texts, view documentaries and feature films, and discuss topics that arise over the course of the journey.
A broad range of historical phenomena will be covered and will be linked to contemporary issues and events. Topics will include: Native North America; Spain and the Southwest borderlands; gender, sexuality, and the conquest of the West: Texas and Oklahoma as ethno-racial borderlands; migration, immigration, and the construction of the Mexico-U.S. border, popular culture and the politics of representation; environmental and social justice movements in the Atomic West; memory and commemoration in the West; and multiculturalism in the twentieth century urban West.