Honors 291S: Tools for Change, 4 credits, offered each spring
This course is the first of three focused on developing the practical abilities to work toward the good society envisioned in the previous semester's course. "Tools for change” which are covered include:
- Social justice theory: understanding systems of power, privilege, and oppression, and where each of us is located within these systems.
- Systems perspectives on community organizations and on communities: understanding how community organizations and the communities they serve are structured and how they function.
- People skills: including cross-cultural communication, deliberation, group dynamics and group facilitation, negotiation and conflict management, and communication with/within community organizations.
- Community-Based Research: learning how to develop knowledge needed to inform and guide action.
- Practicing “to be awake”: through contemplation and intuition, we develop the capacity to be in the present moment, to align our choices and actions with our deeper values and concerns, to live with integrity, and to contribute to healing in the world.
- Students' service placements will be the focus of a mini-research project that employs all of these tools.
