Freedom and Citizenship is a nonprofit community engagement program that provides low-income NYC high school students with a political philosophy seminar, college preparedness support and civic engagement opportunities. Each year, the program hires around 15 paid undergraduate TAs who guide students in making the difficult transition from high school to college-level work in the humanities.
The program begins in July with an intensive summer seminar modeled on the CC curriculum. Seminar professors include Roosevelt Montás (Columbia) and Humberto Ballesteros (Hostos) and texts include Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B Du Bois, John Dewey and Martin Luther King, Jr, among others. Undergraduate TAs are a crucial part of our program: during the summer they run writing workshops, supervise our students in the dorms and hold reading and writing sessions to help students complete their work. During the academic year, TAs continue to mentor students on their college applications and some will develop Civic Leadership Projects with students on topics of their choosing. Past projects have included food insecurity, health care inequity, school segregation in New York City, and mass incarceration. Watch this video about our program to learn more, or take a look through the F&C Civic Digest written and edited by a student cohort.
The program is looking for sophomores and juniors with strong writing, reading, and leadership skills to apply. Students who are interested in careers in education, politics, or who want to address education inequality in their community would be a particularly good fit for us. The program is looking for Classroom TAs who can commute to campus and will sit in on daily seminars, lead reading groups for students, and develop social programming for the summer.
They are also looking for Residential TAs who will live in the dorms with students, teach writing skills, lead writing workshops and cultivate community for students. They recruit both Barnard and Columbia undergraduates for our TA positions, though Barnard students must have taken courses with readings that are similar to the CC curriculum.
You can learn more about the jobs, compensation, and the program by visiting their website, and contacting them at freedomandcitizenship@columbia.edu with any questions.