Gco's Influence On Higher Education

GCO has helped me better understand empowerment and accountability jin higher education by offering me alternative ways of understanding and valuing knowledge within my own experience as well as offering other ways, imagined and real, that academia can and should be acting in relation to their position in society. First I think GCO has helped me understand empowerment through valuing experiential knowledge and other ways of knowing the world besides what is determined as academically worthy through traditional educational methods. This was personally empowering as I realized that not only can I connect the issue I am learning about to my own life and experiences but that these ways of knowing are just as equally valuable, especially in terms
After reading Arthur Keene’s piece, STUDENTS AS NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTS, I can’t help but think about how Debt as a pedagogy not only influences us in the ways we view and treat our education but how it might affect the ways in which we try to push back against our institutions as well. It’s difficult, and complicated but that just means we have to approach solutions from a complex manner too. If we are implicitly influenced by this ‘debt pedagogy’ and treat our education as a commodity, then how can we try to change this mindset and framework while still trying to hold institutions accountable. Perhaps this might even be useful into beginning to tap into student’s initial desire to hold institutions accountable, but I also think it’s complex and needs to be approached through many different
However, as we have seen with divest campaigns, black lives matter discussions and pressures for undocumented rights, we as student activist have also see how the college fails to keep its words on the values it holds. I think this has been something that has really been apparent me as so many students not only see their education as an investment but also feel that the college only see’s us as financial investments. One discussion I have had over and over again with students activists and not is the ways in which with campaigns like “Women for the World” there is an implicit notion that we are not only to be successful because of smith but we are expected to give back and carry the smith name with us wherever we go. We are in a lot of ways seen as an investment, but at the same time an investment that can only expect certain things, not including the demands that students of color, and student activist have been asking for for years. This is also the difficulty with institutional accountability from a student's perspective is that because the turnover rate is so quick it is hard to sustain the people power and knowledge and often times the college banks on that and tries to push things off or relegates the issues to focus groups. This has been frustrating in terms of