Taught By:
Emily Vietti
Associate Teaching Professor & Civic Engagement Faculty Fellow
University of Kansas
Read profile here.
Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I am the Civic Engagement Faculty Fellow for our Center for Service Learning, and part of my job is helping faculty think through the inclusion of civic engagement in their courses. I also lead our Civic Engagement Ambassadors campus group, which brings together faculty and staff who want to encourage and grow civic engagement in a wide variety of ways/contexts on our campus. I'm working on a project to train students to be poll workers, specifically students from rural communities.
Course Description:
Kansas is a mostly rural state, and rural communities are in desperate need of service providers. In most places, not just rural communities, poll workers are significantly older than the general population, and are rarely representative of their communities. So, the idea would be to train students, both in the technical aspects of working at the polls, but also in skills like conflict management and intergenerational communication, while also teaching them about the historical and civic contexts of voting in the United States. Then, we could send these students back to their home communities for election day to work as poll workers and engage in their communities as informed citizens and leaders.
