Lisa Albrecht, BA '72 & PhD '84

Commitment to social change began at UB

 

Designing her dream job

Lisa Albrecht, BA ’72, PhD ’84, transferred to UB just after the turbulent anti-war demonstrations of the late 1960’s.  Against that backdrop, Albrecht, an English major and then English education graduate student, began taking additional courses in women’s studies, which set the stage for a career in social justice.  “I started being anti-war in high school, but I didn’t put the pieces together,” the New York City native says.  “I knew it (the war) wasn’t right, but didn’t look at it through the lens of racism, or colonialism or imperialism because I didn’t have any of that language yet.  That all came from women’s studies and my studies at UB.”  Now an associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota, Albrecht says that she got to “design her dream job” when she developed a new university-wide social justice minor.  She explains, “The whole mission of the minor is to teach students how to work for social change and how to do community organizing.  I am really committed to this work and feel very lucky to have it.”

Set on a path

Albrecht majored in English because she wanted to write.  She recounts taking a Shakespeare course with Professor Richard Fly, a poetry course with the late Professor Robert Creeley, and a film course with Professor Stefan Fleischer.  Albrecht says that she became interested in women’s literature after taking a course with Fleischer’s wife, Martha, who Albrecht said was a fabulous teacher.  Albrecht was also involved in political issues off-campus, including the Emma – The Buffalo Women’s Bookstore and other feminist community work.

Albrecht earned a teaching degree and taught high school English in northern New York for a few years before returning to UB for her doctorate.  Under the guidance of English education professors Charles Cooper and Lee Odell, Albrecht procured a teaching assistantship at the University Learning Center.  She moved up the ranks, first teaching freshman writing, then directing the Writing Center and then overseeing the university’s writing component.  “It was a wonderful opportunity,” Albrecht says.  “It was like a teaching laboratory, and the teaching of writing became my focus in curriculum and instruction.  It was also a time of really huge advancements in affirmative action, so I worked with many undergraduate students of color, as well as having many graduate school colleagues of color.  The experience set me on a path that I have continued on today.”

Major life moment

Albrecht had so enjoyed her undergraduate women’s studies courses that she decided to continue them at the graduate level.  In particular, Professor Gail Kelly’s cross-cultural studies of women in education and Professor Elizabeth Kennedy’s anthropology of women were courses that she says, “changed my life.”  She credits her women’s studies instructors – Kennedy, Kelly, Sharon Leder, Maxine Seller and Lois Weis – with mentoring her and opening her eyes to her role in social justice.  “I came to understand that so much of my experiences in education from an early age were connected to power and privilege in my own life,” she says.  “I grew up working class, and I always thought I wasn’t smart because I wasn’t as sharp as other people linguistically.  I came out as a lesbian in 1978 and I came to understand homophobia.  In working with so many brilliant women of color I really came to understand affirmative action.  Everything kind of clicked when I took those two women’s studies courses.  It was a major moment in my life.”  Albrecht realized that she could not pursue composition studies without tying in feminism; her doctoral dissertation was an ethnographic analysis of thirteen different feminist women writers.

Amazing Students

Albrecht also developed her pedagogical style based on the instruction she received at UB.  She explains, “I became a Freirean educator because of Liz Kennedy.  I was often bored with lectures, so I came to understand critical pedagogy and non-traditional ways of teaching that are not lectures and multiple choice questions.”  She parlayed that teaching acumen into a tenure track position with the University of Minnesota’s General College in 1985.  For almost 20 years Albrecht taught both there and for women’s studies before joining the university’s School of Social Work to launch the social justice minor.  The minor combines writing-intensive courses from women’s studies, ethnic studies, social work, sociology and history as well as 30 hours per semester of service learning in social justice organizations.

Albrecht utilizes her many connections with local community agencies to help her students get involved.  She is also on the board of a national organization called Project South:  Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide.  The group focuses on movement-building work across the country, particularly on grassroots leadership development through popular education.  Albrecht has also co-edited multiple feminist collections.  She says, “Politically for me collaborative work is really important, both cross-racially, and across classes, to really get at the kind of diverse feminist perspective that we need.” 

Currently she is working on a compilation of interviews of white people working for racial justice as well as a memoir, which she hopes to finish before she retires to devote more time to doing community work.  She enjoys swimming, gardening, and has played in a women’s Klezmer band.  But for now she is happy to continue teaching.  “I love learning from my students, and I hope, given the pedagogy I use, which is not lecturing, that they learn from me by sitting in this circle where we educate each other.  They are pretty amazing.  They make me come back every day.”

--Jessica Dudek, BA ’94
April 2008

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