Stanford
Office of Inclusion, Community and Integrative Learning
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Program Structure & Curriculum

Our program begins in the winter quarter and culminates in the summer. During this time, participants will engage in a series of workshops, journal clubs, and undertake a praxis project. 

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Learning Goals

  1. Participants will gain critical understanding of participant’s identity and positionality
  2. Participants will explore current and historical oppressive infrastructures
  3. Participants will develop a culturally competent praxis for transformative and inclusive change

Curriculum Overview

  1. Workshop Series: The program begins in the Winter Quarter with 7 workshops that utilize an Intergroup Dialogue approach. 
  2. Journal Clubs: In the Spring Quarter, participants engage in 7 journal clubs facilitated by the certificate team. During these meetings, participants have the opportunity to delve into more recent/cutting-edge social science papers. 
  3. Electives: Alongside journal clubs, participants will complete an elective to engage in this type of work outside of our scheduled journal clubs. Electives can be a Stanford course, workshops, seminars, or conferences. Participants should engage in elective work for a minimum of 6 hours. 
  4. Praxis Project: Participants will develop a praxis project and reflect on the experience through a symposium presentation.
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Praxis Project Framework

Praxis requires two mutual components: critical reflection and action. We believe that both must occur in the pursuit of justice, equity, and liberation. The CCC&AOP program expands participants' understanding of social justice concepts while providing opportunities for critical reflection on these new insights. To do this, participants will engage in the process of creating a praxis project as their comprehension surrounding systems of oppression evolves. 

During Winter workshops and Spring journal clubs, participants learn about the existing oppressive frameworks in our society. During journal clubs, participants will share their praxis ideas and receive feedback from the cohort. After the journal clubs, each participant will meet individually with the core administrative team to finalize their praxis. Once the praxis project is finalized, participants will present their project to their cohort and the greater Stanford community. 

Guiding principles for the praxis project are:

  1. Transformative change that confronts dominant narratives, balances systems of privilege, and challenges unjust power dynamics.
  2. Action is collective. Service is not performed “for”, but rather “with” the community.
  3. One must not employ methods of dehumanization but rather center the needs of communities in true praxis.
  4. Reflection that follows this action should help you discover yourself. Such discoveries shed light on the commonalities you share and motivate continual action beyond certificate completion.
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Praxis Project Examples 

  • Veronica Brand: Creating a sustainable link between the school’s PTA and families of San Miguel Elementary School by working to determine effective platforms for engagement and increasing diverse representation on the PTA.
  • Eamon Byrne: Despite facing many inequities, marginalized communities contribute greatly to our academic spaces, making it possible for us all to thrive. However, these inequities and contributions often go unrecognized. An acknowledgement statement was created and disseminated in order to make these contributions and inequities more visible on a day-to-day basis.
  • Margaret Daly: Promoting gender equality at sea through work with Comunidad y Biodiversidad A.C. (COBI) to raise money for requested support supplies and helped to create blog posts on gender equality in the Community Leaders Program. Work continues with collaborations between COBI the Consortium for Ocean Leadership.
  • Stephen Galdi: To create an inclusive community despite social distance, this project will focus on leading participants through recipes representative of the wide range of backgrounds of the trainees from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
  • Avery Krieger: To increase visibility of marginalized science and create readymade social content for diversity-based affinity organizations, this project will introduce the research of Stanford marginalized scientists via a music playlist and short bio.
  • Caroline Muraida: Acting as an ally to the Disability Justice Culture Club (DJCC) COVID mutual aid network, this project is all about answering the call to be an active member to serve those in need at this unprecedented time. It also includes active participation in the Crip Camp online seminar series.
  • Stephanie Robillard: Fulfilling book requests with added annotations to maximize engagement and interactive fun, while also providing information from the local library about summer programming.
  • Sparkle Springfield: A digital onboarding package for incoming Stanford black women and potentially other women of color postdocs organized by year and includes well-being resources found on and around the Stanford University campus. The package aims at solidifying the support system for success available to the incoming black women postdocs.
  • Caleb Zerger: Help spearhead the creation of a COVID19 Mutual Aid effort for Stanford’s community. The effort will continue by creating a student-initiated resource-runner pipeline that will help ensure resources procurement, for example distribution from the Second Harvest Food Bank.