Taught By:
Nora Timmerman
Associate Teaching Professor
Sustainable Communities
Northern Arizona University
Read profile here.
Course Description:
The central focus of this seminar is the theory and practice of powerful forms of community leadership and peer mentoring in the context of community-based work. At its heart, this course is about the art of possibility: learning how to ask, experiment with, and learn from “what if?” and “why?” questions that help us vision and create the world(s) we want. Working as leaders and mentors, students will focus on effective practices of organizing that enable them to enhance their own and others’ capacity to become agents of change in relation to democratic, socially just, and sustainable communities. Threaded through the semester are themes of power and powerlessness, hope and hopelessness, vision and stuckness, community and individualism, speech and silence, and liberation and oppression.
This seminar teaches students about community leadership and peer mentoring through the application of grassroots theory and history to real-world contexts. Students’ concurrent enrollment in SUS 208 pairs them with a local student or community group working toward just and sustainable communities. In SUS 230, we will theorize the leadership and mentoring experiences from SUS 208, connect practice to theory, and deepen our understanding of power, positionality, identity, and community/civic engagement.
