ABSTRACT
The power of work that has personal meaning for the students and is consequential in the public sphere is most dramatically evident in the projects in Susan Dicklitch-Nelson and Amara Riley's seminar, Human Rights-Human Wrongs. Citizen-students need to be able to work in groups that include members "without credentialed expertise" and who are very different from them in order to collectively construct knowledge. As students "develop the skills and capacities for self-reliant public action", their sense of control over their own education increases. In the classroom, students are too often seen as "little pitchers" to be filled with knowledge rather than being expected to co-create it. This reflects the pervasive market culture in which they have been raised. Faculty in the humanities and increasingly in the sciences, are rewarded for individual and basic scholarship, produced according to standards of "technical rationality"- standards that are simply not applicable in the messy world of political action.
