Introduction
Chapter 1 — Social Action: An Overview
Social Action and Its Role on Colleges
Chapter 2 — Developing a Social Action Class
Course vs Co-Curricular & Prerequisites
Creating a Social Action Syllabus
Teaching Style & Classroom Norms
Role of Place & Each Semester v Every Year
Chapter 3 — Teaching Social Action (TSA) Model
Chapter 4 — Where Do We Go From Here?
Introduction
A Faculty Guide to Teaching Social Action can be read by itself or in conjunction with CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action by Dr. Scott Myers-Lipton. The Faculty Guide includes video presentations of Scott and other faculty who have taught social action, as well as fliers for student recruitment, classroom assignments (e.g., portfolio writing assignments, logs, grading rubric, etc.), and material produced by a student campaign from Issue Development to Building Power to Campaign Kickoff to victory.
Some of you will be reading the Faculty Guide as you prepare to attend an Institute on Teaching Social Action. While the Institute does include a few videos and examples of student writing, there are many more examples of these type of resources in the Faculty Guide. In addition, the Institute is jammed packed, and quick moving, so the Faculty Guide allows for depth.
The Institute helps faculty (and staff who can teach) develop a syllabus and a plan for teaching a course that involves students launching policy-change campaigns by about mid-semester. This is what differentiates this model most courses on change, as most courses have students talk about change, this model has students doing change.
To participate in an upcoming virtual or in-person Institute, please apply by visiting our Events page. Our Institute is registration-free, and is designed to be a collaborative working space for those who are committed to teaching a social action course or co-curricular workshop series in the near future. The goal of the Institute is to introduce faculty and staff to an experiential learning approach for incorporating social action campaigns into either a semester-long course or co-curricular workshop series. In this transformative experiential learning model, students develop and launch a social action campaign of their choosing during the semester the course is taught. The student campaigns seek to change a rule, regulation, norm, or practice of an institution, whether on campus or in the community.
For your student readings, you may want to use CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action by Scott Myers-Lipton as one of the textbooks for your class. It follows the structure of the Companion Guide, which has students launching their campaigns by the eight or ninth week of the class.
It should be noted that some of you may just be reading the Faculty Guide and CHANGE, and then decide to teach a social action course. If you are doing this, please email Bobby Hackett at rhackett@bonner.org and he will connect you to our Community of Practice, which meets twice a semester in virtual Meetups to discuss what we are learning about how to teach social action.
Both CHANGE books and the Faculty Guide cover the below stages to develop and launch a student campaign:
- Issue Development
- Group Dynamics
- Change Theory
- Building Power
- Research
- Strategy & Tactics
- Campaign Kickoff (1st Action)
- Campaign Plan
- Campaign Evaluation
Teaching Social Action (TSA) invites you to join our on-going support and networking community of fellow practitioners who are teaching or learning how to teach social action using this experiential, real-world model. Our Community of Practice meets twice a semester at Zoom Meet-Ups to discuss what is happening in the now 75+ courses that are happening each semester. Social action is recognized as a pathway of public service and civic engagement.
TSA’s vision is to mainstream this model for teaching active democracy so that at every college, every semester, there is a course where students learn social action by doing it. The world needs more citizens who have developed their knowledge and skills in bringing about positive change through real world experience. While not all of the student campaigns are successful, many have been and those that haven’t succeeded have still taught valuable lessons to those who have participated in them.
Continue to Ch. 1 — Social Action: An Overview