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Turning a New Page in First-Year Reading

UNC Asheville Incoming Students Examine Race, Equity and Power

By UNC Asheville

August 16^th, 2021

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story…The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

-“The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie

The University of North Carolina Asheville acknowledges, with respect, that the land we are on today is ancestral land of the Anikituwagi, more commonly known as the Cherokee. We recognize the Cherokee as the native people and original stewards of this land.

-Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and UNC Asheville Land Acknowledgement

For some activists and academics, [land] acknowledgement is the first step in decolonizing institutional practices that furthers a settler-colonial agenda. Others argue still that unless there are serious conversations around land rematriation then an acknowledgement is simply a move to innocence rather than a call to action.

-Trey Adcock, “Native Lands,” Journeys Magazine

America’s not unique in its sins as a country. We’re not unique in our evils... I think where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them, and the legends and myths we tell about our inherent goodness to hide and cover and conceal, so that we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our innocence.

-Eddie Glaude, “This Is Us,” MSNBC interview

First-year students will have a lot to talk about when they arrive on campus for the fall semester, including the passages above, each pulled from a series of articles, blog posts and videos that first-year students are being asked to read or watch as for their First Year Seminar courses. These materials, offered in lieu of a single-text summer reading, all revolve around ideas of race, equity and power, the common theme that will be integrated into all First-Year Seminar courses.

“The University has made a very clear that these topics are something that we care about; it's in line with our Racial Justice Roadmap,” said Regine Criser, associate professor of German, chair of languages and literatures, and director of first and second year academic success. “The First-Year Seminar is the class that the majority of our incoming students are going to take, and so that felt like the best class to make sure we start having these conversations.”

Choosing the media that the students would use as their scaffolding for these conversations was an important part of creating the First-Year Seminar, Criser explained.

Regine Criser, associate professor of German, chair of languages and literatures, and director of first and second year academic success

“What could we do to make sure, for example, that all of our first-year students participate in a conversation about race, about equity and about power? And how can we engage these themes from a variety of view points of historically marginalized communities?” said Criser. “If we don't do a single author book, then let's think as broad as possible and move away from just thinking about text, but really think about a multi-modal collection of materials that we know would be more accessible to students. That's how we ended up with these core materials.

The core materials include the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians & UNC Asheville Land Acknowledgement; “Native Lands,” an article about land acknowledgements by Trey Adcock, associate professor and director of American Indian and indigenous studies at UNC Asheville; a TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie called “The Danger of a Single Story,” a blog post, “Speaking Up Without Tearing Us Down” by adrienne maree brown; and two videos, “Systemic Racism Explained,” and “This Is Us,” an MSNBC interview with Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude.

Criser and the First-Year Seminar Advisory Committee also curated additional materials for faculty who might want to dive deeper into a particular subject, and offered a workshop on anti-racist pedagogies help prepare faculty for these conversations with their students.

“I have to say I was really proud of my colleagues, because those were conversations that required a good amount of vulnerability,” Criser said, “and many of them were willing to go down that road, that was really good to see.”

More than 20 FYS courses will be offered in the fall semester, from Our Sun in Science & Society to Migrants and Refugees in a Global Context to Ancient Roman Woodworking, each with their own take and way to incorporate the theme of race, power and equity.

One class of incoming students has already gotten a head start on their college career with Caitlin Brez, assistant professor of psychology, who taught A Developmental Perspective of Race, Power & Equity: Can Kids Effect Change, during summer 2021, using her expertise in developmental psychology as a lens for examining the First-Year Seminar (FYS) theme. “All of my training has to do with kids and how kids learn about the world,” Brez said. “My slant on the class is, how we talk to kids about race? And how we can maybe use kids as a means for improving racial relations?”

Caden Pheasant, a first-year student from Cherokee, North Carolina and an incoming McRae Scholar, jumped on the opportunity to take his first UNC Asheville online during the summer.

“I’ve gotten to know my classmates of the past few weeks, and everyone’s pretty cool,” Pheasant said. “You get to know that person and you can see not only the viewpoint of the story we’re reading, you can also see how your classmates view it, and what they’ve experienced.”

Pheasant says he’s also benefited from the “first-year experience” aspect of the class, which helps students learn about academic advising, college resources available to them, and how the academic year works.

“It's always good to have that helping hand,” Pheasant said. “You’ve got all the resources you could want, like great centers on campus and facilities and instructors and professors that care about you…They’ll help you grow.”

For Pheasant and his fellow first-year students, that growth has already begun. Race, power and equity is a heavy topic to take on, especially in an introductory college course, but it’s an important one, and one the students have responded well to, Brez said.

“Some of my students just this morning were disclosing to me that they've never encountered these topics before as recently as the last couple years, and that makes me think that it's a really important thing for us to be doing,” Brez said. “Regardless of your family background, your educational background, your community background, when you come here, we're going to make sure we have these conversations, because they are important.”

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