I am deeply committed to a public, intellectual engagement where scholarship and pedagogy are deployed outside the classroom. As a teacher, I develop in-class activities and assignments that engage students with the greater community. For example, in my composition course, students work with a community group or club and then write a policy-based grant proposal for the organization. Every year I discover that multiple students remain active and sometimes even serve as leaders in the organizations they researched. In a class on intersectionality, students research and create a website designed to educate UNC’s student body and administrators about racial issues on campus.
My attempts to reach and engage the larger public with conversations about race recently resulted in an invitation from UNC’s Carolina Public Humanities to co-lead a community symposium on race and racism in the twenty-first century in New Bern, NC. I have also participated as a panelist on a local public radio show to discuss critical race theory and narrative.
Additionally, I have relied upon my academic experience to serve as a Spanish translator at a free, low-income law clinic and have taught Shakespeare at a youth detention center. Currently, I volunteer as a reading instructor at the Durham Literacy Center, and I have worked as a researcher and coordinator for a the UNC faculty/student working group Racial Literacies.
These and other interdisciplinary experiences have not only furthered my sense of the value of the humanities, but also my desire to continually find new ways to reach, engage with, and learn from different communities.
Dwight Tanner 