Teaching Resources
We’re posting these resources for all of our colleagues who are transitioning to online teaching because of Covid 19. You’ll find three lessons below that include readings, video lectures/webinars, and potential online discussion questions. Depending on the topic, these might be suitable for sociology, criminology, social work, literature, history, and perhaps other classroom. We hope that these resources might assist you in making the transition online.
For trainings and webinars designed for service providers, please visit our Training page.
Please contact us if you have any questions or need more materials.
Human Trafficking Among Homeless Youth
Homeless youth are especially vulnerable to both sex and labor trafficking. We conducted interviews with 641 homeless youth in Covenant House shelters around the US and Canada and found that 1/5 of them had been trafficked in their lifetimes. The full report provides our findings, including information about the economic factors that push young people into dangerous work situations. The video below provides a short summary of the findings. This might be a good resource for introducing the issue of human trafficking in North America to students. (See next set of materials for a lesson focused more on methods.)
Potential questions for online discussion:
1) What do you think might account for the differences between rates of trafficking in the different cities? Hint: It’s not necessarily that there is definitively more trafficking in one place than another.
2) Why is there so much emphasis on the definition of trafficking at the beginning of the report? How does the choice of a definition affect a study like this? Can you find other definitions of human trafficking online that would be different?
3) The findings suggest that economic instability is a leading cause of trafficking among homeless youth. Is there something our community can or should do to protect youth from being vulnerable to traffickers?
Design and Limitations of Research on Human Trafficking
For courses in which students are thinking about social science research design, the webinar below explains how we constructed our study among homeless youth, and focuses especially on research challenges, limitations of our study, and the way the data was shared and misinterpreted after it was released. Can be paired with reading the original report or with the video above.
Potential questions for online discussion:
1) What is the role of the limitations section in a research study? Why is that section so important? Are there other limitations that this study could have explained in the report?
2) What does it mean that the number of trafficking victims is likely under-reported? Why would some cases of trafficking not be recognized in a research study? How can we attend to both our investment in gaining knowledge of hidden issues like this and to our responsibility to be sensitive to people’s privacy and trauma?
3) This study’s findings was misrepresented in the media. Can you find other examples of studies that are being misrepresented? How is coronavirus being misrepresented? What are the dangers of misunderstanding, misinterpreting, and misrepresenting data for social issues such as these?
4) This webinar does not describe the team’s protocols for working with youth who may be traumatized. What rules would you have in place in a study to protect their safety and well-being? What strategies would you use to assist the research team in their own secondary trauma?
The New slave narrative
Slave narratives animated the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the lived experiences of people who had suffered in bondage. In the 21st century, survivors of slavery are similarly writing life narratives and the anti-slavery movements of today are putting them to varied political purposes. A chapter from Survivors of Slavery: Modern Day Slave Narratives provides students with a short set of readings of first-person narratives. A chapter from The New Slave Narrative: The Battle Over Representations of the Contemporary Slavery provides a critique of the mechanisms by which slave narratives are being put to problematic political and military purposes. The video below is a lecture where I was asked to present to student activists at the University of Oklahoma, covering the broader outlines of the book and how they can engage in broader efforts to address contemporary forms of slavery. This material could be taught in literature, history, social work, or social science classes.
Potential questions for online discussion:
1) In what ways do these narratives resonate with the ones we’re familiar with from the 19th century? What are the tropes of the 19th century narrative and what are the tropes of the 21st century? What are some potential reasons for the innovations in the 21st century?
2) How does the structure and form of the narrative affect the authors’ ability to perform legitimacy and authority and readers’ ability to understand and believe what the authors are saying about slavery?
3) Why is it so important that we hear the life narratives of survivors of slavery (or other forms of social injustice or crime)? In what ways might telling these stories be empowering for them? In what ways might they be employed by anti-slavery or anti-trafficking organizations?
4) Is it necessarily voyeuristic to want to learn about enslaved lives? Is there a way to engage these narratives in a way that is not voyeuristic?
5) Do you agree with the speaker that the Ugandan narrative was misappropriated? What are the risks of imposing our own values/politics on the narratives of survivors?
