Scott Myers-Lipton first wrote a textbook — CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action — that follows the flow of his social action course model. Then he wrote a second book for faculty and staff to teach this model entitled CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action. We then compiled CHANGE! A Companion Guide to Teaching Social Action that provides additional material to help faculty and staff teach social action.
CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action helps students learn how to bring about the change they believe will improve their community. What distinguishes an experiential social action class from other social change courses is that students are actively involved in enacting a policy change of their choice, providing first-hand experience of democracy and power. Students can choose to start a new campaign, keep a campaign going from a previous semester, or join a community campaign.
This valuable new edition includes updates to the student vctories section, reordering and updating of chapters for better student learning, and updates to all of the portfolio assignments.
CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action is for faculty, staff, and students who are interested in developing a college course or co-curricular experience using social action. The goal of this book is to train the next generation of democratic citizens and participants. The hope is that if teaching social action is mainstreamed in higher education, students will be able to do democracy more effectively, and help to preserve it at the same time. More specifically, the book provides an overview of the history of college social action, explores what needs to be considered before starting a social action class, explains how students choose their campaigns and launch them, and how students plan, implement, and evaluate their campaigns.
CHANGE! A Companion Guide to Teaching Social Action is designed to be read along with CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action in order to prepare participants who will be attending one of our virtual or in-person Teaching Social Action Institutes.
The Companion Guide assumes you are actively reading CHANGE! A Guide to Teaching Social Action. We have organized this material to mirror the chapters of the book. We include video presentations by Scott from our prior virtual Institutes and examples from student campaign activities and actions, portfolio writing assignments, flyers, aw well as material produced by one student campaign from beginning to victory.
Access the Companion Guide