CHANGE!: A Guide to Teaching Social Action

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. Social action occurs when everyday people band together to develop their power in order to change policy. What distinguishes a social action class from other social change courses is that students are actively involved in enacting a policy change of their choice, thus providing students with a first-hand experience of democracy and power. As part of the social action class, students can start a new campaign, keep a campaign going from the previous semester, reactivate a campaign from a previous year, or join a community campaign.
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.

Scott Myers-Lipton, Professor of Sociology at San José State University, is the author of CHANGE! A Student Guide to Social Action, Ending Extreme Inequality: An Economic Bill of Rights Approach to Eliminate Poverty, Rebuild America: Solving the Economic Crisis through Civic Works and Social Solutions to Poverty: America’s Struggle to Build a Just Society. He is the recipient of the Manuel Vega Latino Empowerment Award, San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP Social Justice Award, the Elbert Reed Award from the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara County, and the Changer Maker Award from the Silicon Valley Council of Non-Profits.