Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I'm interested in participating in this course development program because it directly aligns with my research that focuses on the intersection of critical pedagogy, community organizing, and teacher preparation. I am interested in preparing teachers to be community organizers who work in coalition with students and families to actively resist the social and economic policies that make school transformation impossible. My dissertation will examine how teacher educators introduce and support pre-service teachers to develop activist pedagogies, and an integral component of that study will require pre-service teachers to design and execute various social action campaigns for education justice. This program offers an opportunity to extend that work into concrete curricular design.
As I move toward a future faculty role, I intend to have the majority of my courses engage students in community-based pedagogy and social action. I'm committed to creating learning environments where students study power and inequality to understand the role of collective problem-solving with schools and community organizations. Over time, I hope to build multiyear organizing partnerships that connect successive cohorts of students to ongoing campaigns and action cycles through the creation of educational justice collectives.
This program offers the structure, mentorship, and collaborative space needed to design courses that embody those commitments. It's a chance to bridge my research, my teaching, and my long-term vision for public scholarship and community-engaged social change.
Course Description:
This seminar engages students in the traditions, strategies, and practices of community organizing for educational justice. Grounded in the belief that educators are uniquely positioned to act as advocates, agitators, and coalition-builders, the course introduces pre-service teachers to organizing frameworks that illuminate how power operates within schools and across broader social systems. Students interrogate the historical and contemporary conditions that shape educational inequity, including neoliberal reforms, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, White supremacy, and the bureaucratic structures that govern public schooling.
Through close study of foundational organizers and theorists, such as Saul Alinsky on grassroots mobilization; Paulo Freire on praxis and critical pedagogy, adrienne marie brown on emergent strategy; and contemporary critical and social movement scholars; students explore how organizing traditions have evolved in response to shifting political landscapes. The seminar emphasizes the interplay between personal narrative, collective identity formation, and structural analysis as essential components of effective, multidimensional justice work.
Over the semester, pre-service teachers will build skills in relational organizing, power mapping, issue identification, storytelling for social change, strategic planning, and campaign design. Students will also examine case studies of youth-led, community-led, and educator-led organizing to understand how educational justice campaigns emerge, scale, and sustain momentum.
A central feature of the course is a semester-long organizing project in which students collaboratively develop execute educational justice campaigns. Working in small teams, students will identify a community-rooted issue; conduct stakeholder analyses and one-on-one relational meetings; craft demands; design strategic actions; and mobilize support among peers, families, and community partners. The campaigns culminate in a public action or intervention that demonstrates students' capacity to analyze problems, build relationships, strategize collectively, and mobilize people power to effect change.
By integrating theory, reflection, and praxis, the seminar prepares pre-service teachers to enter the profession as classroom practitioners and movement participants capable of contributing to collective struggles for more equitable and liberatory educational futures.
Taught By:
Cody Norton
Lead Instructor and PhD Student
Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership
University of Maryland
Read profile here.