Skip to content
Active Learning in Political Science ©

Active Learning in Political Science ©

Made possible in part by Soomo Learning

Posted on May 1, 2016April 30, 2016 by craymond

More Civic Engagement Considerations

Ten Thousand VoltsA follow-up post about the mechanical aspects of civic engagement projects, based on my experiences over previous semester:

  • If students are working in teams, each team should start with at least four students. Five is even better. In a team of three people, two often pair off for decision making and the third person becomes passive. Or one of the three drops the class, and the remaining two are invariably weak students who pull down each other’s performance.
  • The necessity of forming teams of adequate size means that certain classes might be too small for this kind of project, especially if you want teams to compete against each other. You will also need to scaffold team output around individually-completed assignments to prevent free riders. Both kinds of student work will need to be assessed transparently.

  • If you have a sufficient enrollment in the class for multiple teams, a team of four or more people might be too large for some potential community partners. Will the partner’s operations be negatively affected by the physical presence of a gaggle of college students?
  • University curricula still get designed around the increasingly fictional notions that learning occurs only on physical campuses and those campuses are inhabited solely by full-time, traditionally-aged residential students. Students’ off-campus engagement with a community partner can interfere with other university-imposed commitments — especially if the project requires students to be off campus for significant amounts of time during normal business hours. And how will students interact with a community partner if there is no public or university-sponsored transportation to move students from and to campus?
  • Learning from civic engagement is maximized when students deliver concrete outcomes that are beneficial to community partners. Handing over a few dozen multi-page reflection essays on “What I learned from civic engagement” at the end of the semester doesn’t cut it. The more you can scaffold course assignments around a defined end product that meets partner needs, the better.

Share this:

  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Facebook
  • Telegram
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • More
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

CategoriesChad Raymond Tagscommunity and civic engagement

Post navigation

Previous PostPrevious Professors Fail Too…
Next PostNext Beginner’s Guide to Simulations: Part 1, Reducing the Workload

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,615 other subscribers

Search

Pages

  • About ALPS
  • ALPS Workshops
  • Higher Ed
  • Simulation and Game Index

Categories

  • Academia (451)
  • Activities and Exercises (538)
  • Amanda Rosen (170)
  • American Politics (47)
  • Assessment and Exams (159)
  • Assignments (143)
  • Chad Raymond (603)
  • Cognitive Science and Psychology (51)
  • Comparative Politics (96)
  • Economics (59)
  • Environmental Politics (23)
  • Game Reviews (17)
  • International Relations (118)
  • Leanne Powner (23)
  • Michelle Allendoerfer (51)
  • Multicultural-International-Global (79)
  • Nina Kollars (44)
  • Online Teaching (100)
  • Peace and Conflict (24)
  • Podcasts (5)
  • Political Theory (27)
  • Public Policy (19)
  • Research Methods (83)
  • Simon Usherwood (496)
  • Simulations and Games (273)
  • Victor Asal (24)
  • Voting and Elections (18)

Tags

  • Africa
  • Asia
  • bookshelf
  • classroom behavior
  • classroom games
  • class size
  • collaboration
  • community and civic engagement
  • conferences
  • critical thinking
  • curriculum
  • design
  • digital visual or social media
  • Europe
  • European Union
  • failure
  • feedback and reflection
  • fiction and film
  • flipped classroom
  • getting them to read
  • getting them to talk
  • guest posts
  • information literacy
  • journals
  • Latin America-Caribbean
  • Middle East
  • online games
  • presentations
  • problem solving
  • projects
  • role play
  • rubrics
  • technology
  • UK
  • women
  • workshops
  • writing

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
Proudly powered by WordPress
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this: