Spring 2027 and Summer 2027
I am interested in this program because I want my students to see social change as something they can actually practice, not just study. In my criminal justice and victimology courses, we talk a lot about harm, justice, advocacy, and community response. I would like to build course assignments that help students take those ideas further by identifying a real problem, listening to the people affected by it, and developing a thoughtful action plan.
I am also interested in bringing this model back to rural Kansas. Many of our communities are working with limited resources, but they also have strong relationships, local knowledge, and people who care deeply about making things better. I think this program would help me design a more hands-on learning experience where students can connect classroom concepts to real community needs in an ethical and practical way. I see this as a chance to strengthen my teaching and create assignments that help students build confidence as advocates, collaborators, and problem-solvers.
Our Civic Learning and Engagement office is sponsoring my participation so I can bring what I learn back to campus and share it with other faculty, staff, and students. I see this as a chance not only to strengthen my own teaching, but also to help support broader conversations about civic learning, student advocacy, and community-engaged course design at FHSU.
Yes. I have taught social action in several ways, although I am interested in this program because I want to make that work more structured and intentional in my courses.
I have taught a social justice course where students examined inequality, power, community needs, and different ways people organize for change. In that class, I asked students to connect course concepts to real-world issues and think about what action could look like beyond awareness alone. I have also built experiential learning into my criminal justice, victimology, and victim advocacy courses through applied projects, community-based assignments, reflection work, and advocacy-focused activities.
Much of my teaching is connected to my community-engaged research with rural communities and survivor-serving organizations. For example, students have worked on public-facing materials, community resource projects, and assignments that ask them to translate research into something useful for advocates, service providers, or community members. These experiences have helped me think carefully about ethical partnership, community accountability, and how to support students as they move from learning about social issues to practicing advocacy in thoughtful and realistic ways. I see this program as a way to build on that foundation and develop stronger tools for teaching students how to plan, communicate, and carry out social action with care.
Students in this course could choose from a wide range of issues, depending on their interests and the needs they see on campus or in the community. Possible campaign topics might include food insecurity, housing insecurity, transportation barriers, mental health resources, sexual violence prevention, relationship-based violence awareness, support for survivors, accessibility for students with disabilities, rural healthcare access, substance use and recovery resources, poverty, student worker rights, childcare needs, immigrant and refugee support, racial equity, LGBTQ+ inclusion, environmental justice, voting access, and barriers facing first-generation or low-income students.
Because many of my students are interested in criminal justice, advocacy, social services, and public policy, I could also see campaigns focused on court access, reentry support, victim services, policing and community trust, juvenile justice, campus safety, and reducing stigma around people impacted by the legal system. I would encourage students to choose issues that are specific enough to act on, such as improving access to campus resources, changing a local policy or practice, creating a referral guide, increasing awareness of an underused service, or building stronger connections between students and community organizations.
How did you hear about opportunity
Listserv
Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for Empowering Victims of Gender-based Violence
Type of Community Engagement
Social Action
I would like to learn more about how to teach social action in settings where there may be real institutional, cultural, or political constraints. For example, how can faculty design meaningful student campaigns when the institution may be cautious about advocacy, when community partners have limited capacity, or when students are working in more conservative communities where some social justice language may create resistance?
I am also interested in how to support students who may be new to social action or unsure about seeing themselves as advocates. Many students care about community issues, but they may worry about conflict, political disagreement, or “getting it wrong.” I would like to learn strategies for helping students choose issues that are actionable, locally grounded, and respectful of different viewpoints, while still encouraging them to think critically about power, inequality, and change.
Finally, I would like to better understand how to balance student agency with ethical boundaries. How much structure should instructors provide? How can we help students work with communities rather than speaking for them? And how can we assess social action projects in ways that value learning, reflection, and process, not just whether a campaign “wins”?
