Spelman College A Choice to Change the World

In Robin Wisniewski’s Transformative College Literacy of Literate Black Peer Counselor’s, she speaks about having to change her way of thinking in order to change her mindset and her way of learning. This part of the text made me think to one of the first things I learned when I arrived at Spelman. During orientation week, the first- year class was introduced to many aspects of college life but one of the things that impacted me the most was one of the meetings we had with the ADW staff. We had been given an assignment to read an excerpt from a literary piece called Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which the author speaks about the banking concept. This concept basically shows how students just become storage containers taking in what is given by the teacher without questioning any facts given to them or creating their own thoughts about the knowledge they are obtaining. It then speaks about the way to change this situation is for the student teacher relationship to be one in which both parties are allowed to learn and to teach. As we spoke about this in the meeting we learned that at Spelman College they want students to be free thinking women who are able to take what they are given and decipher their own thoughts out of it. In order to do so we would each have to change our way of thinking and learning so that we could gain a different mindset and perspective on the things we learn. This would inevitably help us all to transform into better thinking, speaking, and learning young women. It would also help us to be literate in the way that Vania talks about in her quote from Wisniewski’s text:

[Being a literate Black woman means] that I can speak and what I have to say will be heard because I know what I am talking about. If I don’t know about a subject, I want to find out more. If I literally don’t know about something I can’t talk about it. I can’t voice an opinion let alone defend it or be for it because I don’t know anything about it. If you’re ignorant of everything that’s going on and you have no idea and you’re just walking around, then how can you say, we need change, or we need this and that? No. You need to be educated so you can be this influence so you can help others. So you can go out and not be somebody’s quota. So you can go out and be able to stand and be who you are and also be a great influence.

At Spelman we are taught how to obtain and maintain this kind of literacy. Once we have it we are able to live by and uphold our school’s new tagline. Spelman College- A Choice to Change the World.
Jasmine Nicole Robinson