Wood Banks are Keeping Communities Warm

Volunteers across Maine are helping meet emergency heating needs in their communities by establishing wood banks, like food banks but for fuelwood. Models of wood banks vary depending on local needs and resources, but all have a common thread of neighbors helping neighbors stay warm through the winter

School-Based Service: Reconnecting Schools, Communities, and Youth at the Margin

The sound of gunshots was not particularly unusual in Washington Heights, a section of New York City where drug deals were common and children learned early to be vigilant. But on a late summer day in 1992, the fatal shot came from a police revolver, and it was a Dominican, a drug dealer, who was killed. The ensuing turmoil, born of the immediate crisis but a reflection of the longstanding antagonism between the youth of the neighborhood and the police, soon become a riot. Most of the police in the local precinct were White. The overwhelming majority of the young people were Dominican (Sullivan, 1992)

Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom

This article offers a set of race-conscious approaches to teaching premodern Arabic texts in translation, tailored to courses in Islamic studies and related subject areas. Throughout, I address the productive tension generated by the fact that many contemporary translations do not consistently signpost moments of racial thinking as such despite the increase in scholarship on medieval race and racism as well as in the call, on the part of students, to grapple with racialization in our course materials. On the one hand, I argue that such translations can perpetuate what Kimberlé Crenshaw dubs “perspectivelessness” by discursively disengaging from race in various ways, but on the other, I contend that this opens opportunities for critical reading of translation practices as well as of the historical source texts themselves. I offer guided readings of nine Arabic texts in translation from two major press series—Penguin Classics and the Library of Arabic Literature—that lend themselves to classroom use, in which I demonstrate how to foster reading with race in mind. In doing so, I offer an extended meditation on racialization as a comparative and historicizable hermeneutic for understanding premodern Islamic histories and literatures

Service Learning: The Promise and the Risk

Service learning, the pairing of meaningful work in the community and structured reflection, has the potential to transform schools. It provides opportunities for young people to test new roles, develop skills, apply academic learning in a real world setting, and move toward responsible citizenship. Service learning can reinvigorate traditional classrooms and turn passive students into dynamic and engaged learners. However, unless it is implemented with care, with a solid rationale and clearly articulated learning and service goals, service learning will fail to realize this potential. The power and the promise of service learning are too great to allow this imaginative method of teaching and learning to go the way of other creative approaches — mis-interpreted, implemented with inadequate preparation, and then abandoned