Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I'd like to gain insights for my Women's and Gender Studies class - we have a Team Impact Project assignment that I would like to refine. It seems my mission in life during the last decade of my career as a professor is to help students care about things that might not personally affect them and to understand how they can attempt to mitigate or rectify these issues. Main goals include the following:
- to foster education and awareness to fight the sense of helplessness and apathy that individuals commonly feel, and
- to promote activism and team-based skills aimed at promoting change to make the campus and community a more fair and more just place to live and thrive for all.
Course Description:
I am looking forward to the books on setting up a course related to teaching (and practicing) social action. Also, I seek to be informed by these sites
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/25/04/how-educate-social-action
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/what-is-social-justice-education/
This course will straddle both sociological and psychological examinations of social change. Sociologically, what is meant by civic engagement, social action, and community change, and what principles or forces contribute to these movements? Psychologically, how do empathy and compassion and character and courage contribute to the phenomenon?
We will look at the history of social movements (Historic Protest Movements in Every Decade (10 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOaeUbZ7ums ). Students will learn about and discuss a few case studies. Although the focus will be the United States, we will not attempt to cover all noteworthy movements!
We will look at a local example in the form of Charleston Area Justice Ministry. Perhaps we will have a guest speaker trained in the Direct Action and Resaerch Training (DART) tradition.
We will talk about contemporary forces, including the power of social media (On the Spread of Lies on Social Media (17 min.): https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/in-the-digital-age-lies-spread-faster-truth-will-never-win/ )
Students will brainstorm and converge on a topic of mutual interest. Together, the class will create a plan for making local change and execute these plans.