2016 Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellows

Noliwe Rooks

Associate Professor, Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies, Africana Studies and Research Center 

Slow Murder: Food, and the Politics of Justice By Other Means A Solutions Based, Research Driven, Community Centered Course on Food Justice Professor Rooks’ award will help to support a course offered in the fall of 2016, Race & Social Entrepreneurship: Food Justice & Urban Reform which examines the issue of food justice in Ithaca and surrounding areas. It will explore innovative approaches for bringing about social equity and justice in relation to food availability, access, and sustainability for those on a fixed or low income. The course will partner with a local senior center. Working in concert with center residents and other community stakeholders, and drawing on theoretical and historical scholarship, students will work with local farmers, nonprofits, and community activists to learn about local strategies that have sought to make interventions around the issue of food justice.

Bryan Duff

Senior Lecturer in Education and Coordinator of the Undergraduate Minor

Real Kids Make the Best Teachers 

EDUC 4040 was once a foundational course in the Cornell Teacher Education program. That program no longer exists, but the course endures and has evolved to become a powerful model for how to engage community partners in the development and refinement of a service-learning course. More than that, by giving Cornell students genuine responsibility for planning and implementing an after-school program for middle school students, EDUC 4040 has changed lives: the lives of Cornell students who have come to define themselves as teachers and advocates for youth and the lives of middle school students who have made new friends, worked across difference, and learned new skills. Support from a Kaplan fellowship will enable Bryan to include more undergraduates in the course and more middle school students in this powerful local program; it also will enable Bryan and his students to a end a conference to share the model with others in higher education and learn from their related experiences.