The day she found out George Floyd had been murdered, Nadia Brown sat on her patio and watched her three children play. She thought about Floyd calling out to his mother as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes.

“What is something that I can do to make me feel like I have a bit of agency?” Brown, an associate professor of political science at Purdue University, asked herself. “What can I do for my girls?”

Brown’s answer came in the form of a public syllabus, called the #BlackLivesMatter PGI Syllabus. A year later, Brown still gets emails from teachers, librarians and policymakers who use the guide she created.

Public syllabuses often start out as loose lists of resources shared through social media and organized into online guides. As tragedies, from the pandemic to shootings, have shaken the nation and left teachers scrambling to help students make sense of them, public syllabuses have offered a starting point to contextualize current events.

Experts say public syllabuses have allowed scholars of color to lead the way in academic spaces that have long excluded them and to explore issues affecting their own communities. But while the months of worldwide protests following Floyd’s murder has been a catalyst for new guides, the public syllabus model is far from new.

Among these syllabuses is Justice in June, created by two friends, Autumn Gupta and Bryanna Wallace, following Floyd’s murder. Justice in June is meant to help people incorporate racial justice education into their daily schedules in 10, 25 and 45-minute chunks.

“I realized I have some work I can do on my own of learning and setting my foundation,” said Gupta, a 24-year-old middle school science teacher in Smithville, Missouri. “And I thought I could bring people along with me.”

In the first week alone, the syllabus had over 1.1 million Twitter impressions and 200,000 users at a time.

“Since George Floyd, people are feeling powerless and wanting to know how we got to this point,” Brown said. “Public syllabi are giving them those answers.”

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Why do scholars choose public syllabi?

Before Justice in June, the list of public syllabuses was long. There are syllabuses on prison abolition and welfare reform. There's a Tulsa syllabus centering the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, and even the Lemonade Syllabus on Beyoncé’s work. Most recently, syllabuses are in the works on the March mass shooting at three Atlanta spas that left eight people, including six Asian women, dead.

Many scholars cite historian Marcia Chatelain’s Ferguson Syllabus as the model for crowdsourced public syllabuses.

When the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teen, sparked protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Chatelain, a history and African American studies professor at Georgetown University, realized she could use Twitter to strategize with other scholars on how to help teachers frame conversations.

A year later, the Charleston church massacre left nine Black churchgoers dead at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Chad Williams, chair of the African American Studies Department at Brandeis University, and scholars Keisha Blain and Kidada Williams thought back to Chatelain's work.

Williams wanted to start a more historically informed conversation because media coverage often treated the shooting as an isolated incident, rather than part of a larger history of racial violence. So he turned to Twitter.

Nine days after the shooting, #CharlestonSyllabus was trending on Twitter, with thousands using the hashtag. The African American Intellectual History Society published a cohesive version of the syllabus, and it was published as a book called “Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, Racial Violence.”

“It just took off like wildfire,” Williams said. “It really started as a frustrated tweet, and it turned into something much bigger.”

'A critical tradition of scholars of color'

While the Ferguson Syllabus is often cited as the first of its kind, Chatelain said, “crowdsourcing as a practice and tool for education isn’t new.”

Instead, this type of public education outside formal classrooms has deep roots in communities of color, especially in Black intellectual tradition, scholars say. This public education came in the form of pamphlets, speaker series and even protests in civil rights and other movements.

“In some ways, public syllabi are an extension of that work,” Chatelain said. “They carry forward some of that spirit of a political pamphlet.”

Chatelain said scholars of color have turned to this public education because most classrooms long ignored their experiences and because they see their work as tied to the activism in their communities.

"It's a critical tradition of scholars of color," Chatelain said. "And it's because we know the cost of staying silent."

In addition to crowdsourcing, one factor that makes public syllabuses distinct is that they're open access, unlike most syllabi used in college classrooms.

“This open access made the public syllabus much more democratic and detethered the syllabus from its very narrow and even elitist academic roots,” Williams said. “It wasn't just college students or the educated elite who would have access. ... These were resources that were created by the public and for the public.”

The controversy over the Trump Syllabus, created by the Chronicle of Higher Education, shows the benefit of crowdsourcing, said Laura Ciolkowski, creator of the Rape Culture Syllabus.

The initial syllabus was criticized for its lack of diverse voices, so two historians of color independently created a new crowdsourced public syllabus called Trump Syllabus 2.0. Through crowdsourcing, Ciolkowski said Trump Syllabus 2.0 was able to include work by scholars from a range of backgrounds.

“As many people as you can invite into the conversation, the better,” Ciolkowski said.

When creating public syllabuses ,scholars not only engage with the public but also with activists on the frontlines of movements.

As activists gathered in 2016 to protest construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Jaskiran Dhillon, an associate professor of global studies and anthropology at the New School, helped create the Standing Rock Syllabus. Dhillon worked closely with Lakota and Dakota historians. Afterward, they sent copies of the syllabus to front-line resistance camps and to a school organized by water protectors.

“It wasn't developed in isolation from the frontline water and land defense movement,” she said. “It was developed in sync with the movement. That’s something you don’t usually get in a typical syllabus.”

Dhillon said this community-centered approach allows scholars to raise public awareness in a way that makes people more invested.

But public syllabuses also have a place in formal college classrooms, said Hilary Green, an associate professor history at University of Alabama who has used the Charleston Syllabus in her introductory classes since the 2015 shooting.

In one of her graduate-level courses, Green had her students create their own crowdsourced public syllabuses to contextualize the 2016 film “Birth of a Nation.” Years later, she still receives emails from teachers and homeschool parents wanting to use the syllabus.

“My students saw themselves in this immediate conversation and as part of a larger project that they were crowdsourcing,” she said. “They felt that they were part of a movement.”

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'This is a way for us ... to do this work on our own terms'

Many scholars of color say public syllabuses are freeing, allowing them to work beyond the limitations of universities or the so-called ivory tower.

Of all full-time faculty at U.S. degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018, 75% were white, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. A 2019 study from the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy found that there had been little growth in numbers of faculty members of color at U.S. colleges and universities between 2013 and 2017.

Williams said public syllabuses have offered a way to build community with other scholars of color and to feel less alone.

“The university and academia has historically not been a welcoming place for scholars of color. Oftentimes, it's a very hostile space,” Williams said. “So there's always been a need to create alternate forms of community for scholars of color.”

Brown said the syllabuses expose the limitations of universities, where she said race and gender are often seen as an afterthought. Crowdsourced syllabuses, however, “highlight work that is often marginalized by the mainstream,” and center the voices of marginalized communities, she said.

“It gives agency and voice to scholars who are made to feel like they don't matter or that their scholarship doesn't matter,” she said. “This is a way for us to counter, to move outside of the institution, to be able to do this work on our own terms.”

Contact News Now Reporter Christine Fernando at cfernando@usatoday.com or follow her on Twitter at @christinetfern.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Post-George Floyd public syllabi highlight work of scholars of color