The Civil Society Workshop will meet on Wednesday, September 27, at 1 pm for a discussion with

Katherine E. Entigar, Urban Education, GC CUNY

“The education of, and with, adult immigrants in nonprofit organizations”

Abstract: In this talk, I will address the ways in which U.S. scholarship has generated, on the whole, incomplete, flawed knowledge about the educational experiences of adult immigrants in nonprofit organizations, signaling oversights in research as well as the development of pedagogy, teacher preparation, and educational programming. I argue that this oversight is due to the fact that (a) the dominant U.S. narrative discursively constructs adult immigrants as quiescent, politically inert future laborers needing skill-building; (b) U.S.-centric definitions of education tend to draw upon established cultural categories of “diversity,” which have been the basis for monoculturalist, prescriptive educational approaches that obscure immigrants’ transnational, fluid ways of being and knowing; and (c) nonprofit education is traditionally not subject to critique due to its role in U.S. society as a humanitarian response to social challenges. Based on these assertions, I propose a problematic which posits an inquiry-based, interdisciplinary approach to nonprofit education in which adult immigrants are co-authors of the process, partners in the creation of pedagogy and educational priorities in a dialogic, collective, unfinished process. I will discuss my pilot study in Summer 2017, as well as plans for upcoming dissertation research, in which I explore the ways in which adult immigrants as student-contributors experience nonprofit education, and how we can create pluripotential, dynamic, and contested ways of “doing education” that express an ethical, radical commitment to new possibilities in the nonprofit context and beyond

We will meet in room 5401.01 (Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Center’s Library)