A member of an iconic Arkansas civil rights movement group is slated to teach at all three district colleges.
Minnijean Brown-Trickey will be teaching a course titled Civil Rights: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement during the spring 2012 semester.
Brown-Trickey was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African-American students to go to a desegregated school in Arkansas in 1957.
Brown-Trickey will be teaching the course jointly with course consultant Jeff Steinberg, founder of a nationally recognized organization called Sojourn to the Past, an immersion program that sends participants on trips across the country to interact with places rich in civil rights movement history.
The same course will be offered at all three district campuses. It is an evening class that will be offered on Tuesdays at CSM, Thursdays at Cañada and Mondays at Skyline.
Brown-Trickey will be hired as regular staff at all the colleges she will teach at, said Donna Bestock, dean of the social sciences department of Skyline.
The new class will be funded by Measure G, a parcel tax approved in the San Mateo County in 2010. The district took advantage of Measure G's wording that states special funds can go to support innovative programs, said Bestock.
The class is in an experimental phase because it was last minute and it is the first time it is being offered, but hopes are high that it will work out well so that it may become a regular course in district curricula, she said.
The course originated in the Skyline social sciences department and the other two campuses cloned the class, said David Johnson, the dean of Cañada's social science department.
"They took the lead in designing and offering the course. Cañada and CSM followed suit," said Johnson.
Materials were taken from the Sojourn to the Past trips and incorporated into a class curriculum.
The focus of the class is to teach their definition of non-violence to Bay Area students, a demographic, Steinberg said is just as susceptible to racism as any group in the "deep south."
"Americans like to say (the problem) is over there," said Steinberg. But even here in the Bay Area, we continue to use racially insensitive words to address friends or make jokes, he said.
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