Place‐based pedagogy offers students a distinctive way to be attentive to a particular expression of a given religion while enabling them to minimize generalizations on the basis of that experience. Place‐based pedagogies decenter the traditional classroom as the sole locus of learning and emphasize the value of learning within varied spatial frameworks including undeveloped natural environments and built environments in rural, suburban, or urban communities. This article, set in Brooklyn, New York, is a case study of place‐based teaching in an urban context. “Brooklyn and Its Religions” is a course that provides students with a place to explore diverse expressions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The article describes the course and analyzes students' field reports in two settings to demonstrate the value of place‐based learning for studying religion in Brooklyn.
Worker‐owned and worker‐managed cooperatives have a long history in the U.S. They pose an alternative to workplaces structured within capitalism that are hierarchical and do not feature collective decision‐making. The short history of the cooperative movement in this article sets the context for a study of workers in Brooklyn, who are also immigrants, in the field of child care. These workers face additional hurdles to full empowerment at work as they lack comprehensive labor law protection and must contend with the under‐enforcement of existing laws in the U.S. Home‐based child care is inherently isolated and does not foster opportunities for workers to organize in traditional ways. These conditions create a compelling rationale for workers to resist their exploitation through self‐organization and the creation of worker cooperatives. This article will describe how the BeyondCare child care cooperative in Sunset Park, Brooklyn offers its worker owners control over their labor and unfettered access to their earnings. BeyondCare is a useful case study because it is a worker cooperative made up of immigrant women who have learned from other immigrant worker owners how to create meaningful living‐wage labor. The worker owners offer a timely example about the power of immigrant women to reach into a privatized place in the U.S. economy—home‐based labor—and to recreate that work into something that works for them.
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