This new honors course, taught by Jack Selzer, Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professor, is built around a class trip to civil rights sites during Spring Break. Among other places, the bus tour will take us to a number of storied locations: Washington DC and the Lincoln Memorial, site of the August 28, 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom; Greensboro, North Carolina, where the student sit-in movement began in 1960; Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Tennessee, where civil rights workers were trained in non-violence; and more. Students will have the opportunity to meet personally with important surviving veterans of the Freedom Struggle, and they will have ample opportunity for discussions and activities designed to deepen their understanding of a most important episode in American history.
Students will learn how to perform their own sophisticated inquiries into subjects and places relevant to the course topic and contribute their findings to the course Web site. The centerpiece project will consist of a scholarly rhetorical analysis of a piece of civil rights rhetoric that emerges from students’ independent research.
For more details, including cost and scholarship support opportunities for the trip, see the flyer.