The “Study Away Tour,” a new, independent-study course offered this summer through the University of Arizona Department of Africana Studies, allows students have the chance to “study abroad” this summer without ever leaving the country.
The independent-study course will give students the opportunity to visit historical sites in the South and learn about the civil rights era.
The Africana Studies Program offers the only Hop-Hop minor in the nation. The program “prepares future leaders of a global and diverse economy from North and Latin America to Africa and Europe.”
According to the University’s press release, the course ‘is crafted like a domestic version of a study-abroad program, intended to give students an in-person understanding of some of the most important events that have shaped the United States.”
“It’s going to be a total immersion experience,” said Tani Sanchez, a UA associate professor of Africana studies, who will lead the course with Johnny Bowens, a lecturer in Africana studies.
Dr. Sanchez currently teaches Introduction to African Literature, Women, Writers and the Gods (an introduction to black women’s literature), Introduction to African American studies, Blacks in Hollywood, Hip-Hop Cinema, and Film Making of Africa and the African Diaspora (an overview of films made by people of African descent in various parts of the world), according to the department’s website.
The course, open to all majors, runs June 1-6 and may be taken for up to six credits. To earn six credits, students can enroll in an introductory course to Africana studies offered in conjunction with the summer tour. During the summer course, students will live near Emory University in Atlanta.
Students will participate in formal tours of sites such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the APEX Museum, the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a plantation and different interactive museums.
During the program, students will complete class assignments and document their experiences in a “digital diary,” a blog where students compare their ideas about the civil rights movement before and after the tours. Students also will be asked to critically analyze their understanding of the ways African-American history has evolved and changed. The blog will be turned in at the end of the course, with the possibility of publication to an outside website.
UA junior Kevyn Butler, a double major in dance and Africana studies, is enrolled in the summer course is according to the release.
“Usually when you think about studying abroad, it’s out of the country, but taking a study course inside your own country to someplace you haven’t been, I think that’s just as cool as traveling outside the country,” Butler said.
Butler has been to the South, recently participating in a dance performance for the 50th celebration of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in Alabama. He heard about the course before performing and wanted to learn more.
“I thought it would be a different way to experience learning Africana studies, learning about it hands-on,” he said. “Seeing it is a different way to experience education.”