2-Day Trainings

Scott Myers-Lipton, Director of the Teaching Social Action Initiative, is offering 2-day, in-person, training for faculty and staff who want to use social action in their courses or workshop series. The expectation for the 2-day training is that there is minimum of five faculty and staff committed to teach a course or workshop series using social action in the next 18 months.

Importantly, this social action model requires students to launch their own campaign or join a community organization's campaign and create a "student-wing". The key thing is that the students work to enact a policy change on campus or in the community. As long as this is happening, and that the students are doing both "campaign activities", and "campaign actions", we consider this SOCIAL ACTION!

 

• Campaign activities: building power by fliering, tabling, giving presentations to other student organizations and community groups, etc.

• Campaign actions:  public displays of the students' power, which puts pressure on a target through a march, rally, target meeting, lobbying day, street theater, occupying a space, etc.

Furthermore, in this social action model, teachers devote about one-half of the time of the course directly to the students' policy campaigns to explore such topics as issue development, building power, tactics, and campaign implementation.This means that if it is an existing course, some of the material will have to be excluded. Also, the readings are reduced a bit so that the 1.5 hours per week of "policy campaign work" is not too burdensome. 

The 2-day, in-person, training is a highly interactive experience focusing on: (1) social action course topics, (2) student campaign activities and actions; (3) student readings and assignments; (4) class format; and (5) building a community of practice. At the conclusion of the training, faculty and staff will have the building blocks for their course syllabi. The training is open year-round, and occurs on any two days (Saturday & Sunday may work best) from 9-4 pm (i.e., three, 1 ½ hour sessions with several breaks).  Check out the Mural Board that we are using for the 2023 Summer Institute. On the Mural Board, you will find the AGENDA for the Institute, as well as RESOURCES about social action (i.e., videos, readings, syllabus, websites, etc).
 

Cost: Scott Myers-Lipton’s flight, hotel and food; an honorarium is appreciated, but not required.