Social Justice and Cultural Wealth Initiative

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton has been appointed MATC’s chair of social justice. Hamilton was chosen from a national pool of applicants based on her proposal to conduct three innovative projects that unite students, employees and the external community in the shared exploration of social justice issues. Hamilton’s residency will begin in April. Read more about Hamilton on her website.

The Social Justice Chair leads the Social Justice and Cultural Wealth Initiative and advances initiatives in one of the five areas of impact.

The Chair’s work will benefit students, faculty, staff, and the communities represented by MATC’s student body by providing a results-oriented, hands-on approach to sustainable changes that address social justice issues.

While there are no limits to the work that can be done, we prioritize projects which engage students and members of our Milwaukee community around equity and social justice issues relevant to our campus and city, including basic needs insecurity, policing, incarceration, racially inequitable outcomes in education, voting rights, health care, and others. Moreover, the Social Justice Chair is expected to help develop the Social Justice and Cultural Wealth Initiative.

In studying the educational experiences which yield the most positive student outcomes, George Kuh identified 10 high impact practices. According to Kuh, HIPs are specific pedagogies that have positive effects on deep learning , student retention, and ultimately student success.  HIPs encourage students to produce educationally purposeful work resulting from sustained engagement with challenges. MATC is committed to the use of HIPs throughout the curriculum.  

The Social Justice and Cultural Wealth Initiative promotes two of those HIPs: service learning and global learning/study abroad.

Our vision is to create new service learning and study abroad options (or to revisit our existing options) so that they 

• incorporate a social justice focus,
• are designed with an equity lens,
• align with curriculum, perhaps across disciplines, 
• create collaborations between MATC students, MATC employees, and the broader community, and
• include a "report back" expectation so that students share their findings with the community.

We have an existing infrastructure with staff who can assist with the logistics of these experiential experiences. We seek a Social Justice Chair who has the vision to design the experiences, shape the curriculum, create partnerships, and establish equitable & inclusive policies and processes.

Which authors we teach. What behaviors and outcomes we identify as being the standard. Whose histories we tell. What languages we allow in the classroom. Colonization shapes so much of what happens in higher education.  In the midst of our nation's racial reckoning, the call to decolonize higher education has become louder than ever. Indeed, a 21st century education requires us to create spaces and cultures where students can talk about social injustices, can study counter-narratives, and can critically reflect on power and hierarchy. Most importantly, this must happen in learning environments where teachers respect and call upon the cultural wealth that students bring to the classroom and where both parties learn from each other.

Ultimately, we believe that, as Mintz (2021) put it, "our curriculum, syllabi, classroom cultures, pedagogy and assessments" should reflect our college values. To that end, the Social Justice Chair will create (and then lead) teaching and learning communities which will

• Develop a strategic plan and timeline for infusing social justice throughout the curriculum;
• Audit course outcome summaries to ensure that social justice-related outcomes are explicitly stated;
• Apply existing rubrics, such as the Achieving the Dream, or develop our own;
• Analyze course materials and course readings to ensure inclusive and accurate representation across multiple dimensions of diversity;
• Scrutinize assignments to ensure that they foster critical thinking about a broad range of social justice topics and allow student flexibility and innovation;
• Review assignment rubrics;
• Identify outcomes, metrics, and tools to measure impact.

Ongoing professional development for faculty is a valued part of our college culture. MATC's Center for Teaching Excellence provides strategic leadership and an array of development options for faculty. Research by Goddard and others has confirmed that high quality collaborative teaching teams can influence teachers' practices and ultimately improve student learning, particularly when these collaborations focus on analyzing student data and developing instructional responses or focus on curriculum and instructional decisions. Our peer coaching model, faculty learning communities, and Teaching Action Plans reflect our belief in this practice. However, no similar model exists for staff and administrators. Additionally, our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee offers weekly workshops and other learning opportunities on topics related to equity and inclusion.

The Social Justice and Cultural Wealth Initiative seeks to develop a summer faculty series which focuses on specific, culturally affirming pedagogies, such as community-based pedagogy, place-based pedagogy, and so on.

Conference Series

Our students don't live in colleges; they live in communities. As a technical college, we know that engagement with communities is an integral part of education and professional development.

Too often in the community college world, teaching is prioritized over research. Often, faculty and staff work loads leave little capacity to conduct formal research or to share research findings conveniently. As a result, success happens in isolation, and what little published research is available centers on four year colleges and universities. The Social Justice and Cultural Wealth Initiative strives to create platforms for thought leaders, scholars, and practitioners to come together to share best practices (and our "oops" initiatives, too).

We seek a Social Justice Chair who understands the importance of community engagement and recognizes the diverse academic communities that exist. We seek a scholar who would be interested in engaging our community in candid discussions of social justice challenges and co-creating or sharing actionable solutions which have a concrete impact on the community. This might entail developing conferences, hosting annual summits, planning student showcases, and/or creating a database of social justice oriented conferences.

Lecture Series