Juvenile Justice Capstone

Summer 2020
Visioning Exchange: Capstone students/DEL students

Prompt #1:
The world is rapidly changing. All of the changes in climate, social justice, technology, etc., mean that
what passes for “normal” today may be obsolete tomorrow. Movements for justice vitally need spaces
where the starting questions are: “What is the world we want to live in? What would that look like?”
Along the lines of the saying: “you gotta see it to be it,” creative visioning can actually move us toward
the future we would like to build, help us move beyond limitations and help us identify new possibilities.
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Reflecting on the above, please complete this statement: “If Black lives really matter, I
imagine…”

Prompt #2:
Any glance at history reveals that crises and disasters have continually set the stage for change, often for
the better. The global  flu epidemic of 1918  helped create national health services in many European
countries. The twinned crises of the Great Depression and the second world war set the stage for the
modern welfare state.

…[D]isasters and emergencies…rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we
glimpse possibilities of other worlds. Some thinkers who study disasters focus more on all that might go
wrong. Others are more optimistic, framing crises not just in terms of what is lost but also what might be
gained. Every disaster is different, of course, and it’s never just one or the other: loss and gain always
coexist. Only in hindsight will the contours of the new world we’re entering become clear.

(Excerpt from ‘We can’t go back to normal:’ how will coronavirus change the world? by Peter C. Baker,
published on TheGuardian.com, March 31, 2020.)
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What possibilities might [this pandemic] contain, and how [might] it shake us loose from old
ways? In your own wildest imagination, what positive change can come from this global
crisis?

Prompt #3
James Baldwin, Black activist/writer, said: The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins
to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.  The purpose of
education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own
decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in
heaven or not.  To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way
he achieves his own identity.  But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.  What
societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.  If a society
succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.  The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as
responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk.  This is the
only hope society has.  This is the only way societies change.
What is the value, to you, of education?