Chapter 3 — Launching Student Campaigns

CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action

Chapter 3 — Launching Student Campaigns, p. 52-117

Launching Student Campaigns

This chapter discusses how to launch student campaigns in your course. As you will see, these campaigns can be life-changing for students, as noted by Dr. Steven Carr, Communications professor at Purdue University Fort Wayne:

"The students were just so excited that someone had even bothered to ask them what their concerns were. One student said to me that her group’s social action campaign was a lifelong dream. I've never seen anything like this on campus. They created t-shirts. They had an Amazon registry. It was just really, really cool to see that level of engagement."

As you begin to consider how you will launch the student campaigns, it is key that you understand the difference between Campaign Activity and Actions.

Campaign Activities: building power by fliering, tabling, giving presentations to other student orgs and community groups, etc.
Campaign Actions: public displays of the students' power, which puts pressure on a target through a march, rally/press conference, lobbying day, street theater, occupying a space, target meeting, etc.

Bobby Hackett believes that the whole model rests on these two components: Campaign Activities and Actions. Note that the Campaign Activities and Actions have an order to them. You will have to decide which order to place them in, but you may be interested to see how Scott has placed them in his social action course. A general rule is that your students will do about 20 Campaign Activities, which will take them about 7-9 weeks to do, to prepare them for the first Campaign Action (i.e, campaign kickoff or launch)

Below is the class flow for Scott’s social action course. You don’t need to follow it exactly, and feel free to make edits. However, you do have to do Issue Development in the first third of the class, then Building Power by the middle of the course, so you can get to the Campaign Kickoff by the last third of the course.

Note that Scott front-loads Issue Identification, which is the choosing of the issue, as well as the students’ demands and target. Bobby Hackett, President of the Bonner Foundation, and Scott have a saying that guides the social action teaching philosophy: On Your Mark, GO, Get Set. Front loading action provides students the opportunity to GO (that is, to do action), rather than just talk about change. It also makes sure that you have time to do a Campaign Action.

In addition, in Scott’s course, he goes back and forth between Campaign Activities and reflection. This makes sure that students don't get overwhelmed with doing too many things. For example, after the students choose their campaigns, they then "Set the Tone" by discussing Group Dynamics, which doesn't have too many Campaign Activities, and allows them to continue the variety of activities they have for Issue Development. The same is true for Research, which follows Building Power, a section which has a lot of Campaign Activities connected to it. Also, by doing Research at this time, makes students inspired to find the answer, since they realize they need more depth after tabling during the Building Power section.

This back and forth between Campaign Activities and reflection is in-line with Paolo Freire's idea of integrating acting and reflection. Remember, Freire stated, "Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply "blah, blah, blah, "and practice, pure activism."

As you will learn, there are many Campaign Activities tied to Issue Development (i.e., demands and a target), (2) Building Power, (3) Tactics, and (4) Campaign Launch & Implementation. In Sections 3A-J, please take note how SML places them on the Mural Board the various Campaign Activities they must take each week in order to get to a Campaign Action. The goal is to get every group to do at least one Campaign Action.

Your role in helping students get to a Campaign Action is critical. Sometimes the students get stuck about what to do next. In the fall of 2023, Scott visited Dr. Saugher Nojan's Ethnic Studies Methodologies course at San José State about 5 weeks into the semester, and they had four student campaigns going on.

Read the below as an example of what you can do to support your students to get through their Campaign Activities so they can get to a Campaign Action.

Encourage the students "to do" since the students sometimes wait for things to happen.

One of the campaigns was focused on increasing the number of sessions from the university counseling center that the students can receive per semester from 8 to 15 sessions. They said they emailed the demand to their target but had heard nothing back. Scott recommended to them to walk over after class and ask their assistant personally. This proved to be successful, as the students got the meeting!

Help them brainstorm ideas when they were stuck, and connect them to community members.

Another group wa organized around the tuition increase that just passed the California State U. Board of Trustees. They were not sure what the next steps to take since it will go into effect next year. After brainstorming ideas, they came up with the idea of contacting their local State Assembly member and State Senator to see if they would be interested in supporting/introducing a bill to have the State cover the approximately $157 million being asked of the students to pay ($342 x 460,000 CSU students). To support the students, Scott asked them to email him their contact info, and then Scott reached out to two State Legislators, and asked them if they would do a Zoom meeting with the students later in the week. Soon after, both of the legislators reached out to the student group.

Provide them recommendations, but at the same time, remind them that this is their campaign, and they should look at all of the factors and decide for themselves.

A third group had met with their target, a local City Council member, and he was leaning toward NOT supporting their demand to oppose the mayor’s proposal to ban encampments and RVs parking on the street, as well as their demand to convert office spaces to apartments for shelter. They asked for Scott’s advice on which demand to focus on in their remaining weeks of class, and Scott them that his recommendation was to focus on the encampments and RVs parking ban, as this had more emotional impact, and could perhaps get the most traction in their time remaining.

A lot of decisions are made in the class. When students are marking decisions about their campaign, Scott also frames it this way, so as to give them agency: “This is my recommendation. At the same time, you are adults, and you decide on what you think is best to do…”

Below is the class for a one semester course using Scott’s Soci. 164 model, as well as what the model would look like over a two-semester, Co-Curricular Workshop Series.

Based on this framework, below is an overview of the Scott’s entire Sociology 164: Social Action course, showing the flow between campaign activities & actions:

In addition, below is an overview of Scott’s entire Sociology 164: Social Action course, with all of the class topics, campaign activities & actions, readings, assignments, and class structure included.

In Chapter 3 and 4, each step of the Students for Filipino Farmworkers campaign will be presented at the end of each section under CAMPAIGN CASE STUDY. Here is what each stage of their campaign looks like in one image.

Continue to Ch. 3A — On Your Mark

Chapter 3 — Launching Student Campaigns

Introduction

Chapter 1 — Social Action: An Overview

Chapter 2 — Developing a Social Action Class