“We Got You”

A true pedagogue, Janelle M. Silva explores how teaching can be an activist effort that requires critical dialog centered around difference, power, and privilege. Janelle shares the many ways she has used her classroom as a space for transformative learning. Importantly, Janelle guides her students through projects that are not purely academic exercises—they are intended to interrogate and directly address injustice on and beyond campus. For example, she helped her students develop a campus-wide survey regarding the need for a campus Women’s Center. In her most visible and risky course assignment, the Practical Activism Project, she worked with students to plan and execute a campus-wide walkout to demand the creation of a campus Diversity Center. In front of her colleagues and institutional leadership, Janelle publicly shared that she affirmed the students’ desire for a Diversity Center and vowed that she would work with them towards its fruition despite her vulnerable status as a pre-tenure professor and woman of color. Ever the teacher, Janelle shares her strategies for minimizing the professional and personal risks (including burnout and self-neglect) that accompany visible, sustained social activism. She is inspired to continue her work despite these risks, when students remind her that “you got us, and we got you.”