Last fall I taught two sections of a first-year seminar on activism and volunteering, called “Raise a Fist, Lend a Hand: Activism and Volunteerism at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest. I had noted in the course description that a community-service requirement was included, so I expected that students who chose the class would be eager to get involved with social issues.
But what I thought would be the most rewarding and educational aspect of the course proved instead to be challenging and deeply frustrating. I spent most of the semester trying to convince my students of the importance of activism, and trying to motivate them to overcome their apathy, lack of interest, and attempts to stay in their comfort zones.
The summer before the course began, the students were required to read a book on volunteering and then send me an e-mail message detailing their experience as activists or volunteers. I solicited those messages in an effort to help me design the course; I had not yet decided how the students would spend their 10 hours of service. As the e-mail messages trickled in, it became clear that none of the students had ever been an activist, although most had spent years or summers volunteering for various charitable organizations, churches, and hospitals.
Since no student had been an activist, I decided to require that their 10 hours be spent on issue-based activism. Activist hours, I thought, would offer my students the best opportunity to use what they were reading and discussing in class.
I modeled the syllabus to suit the 10-hour requirement. The students and I spent the first two weeks reviewing the summer reading material on volunteering, then turned to activism using Elizabeth May’s How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. We spent multiple sessions defining and understanding the difference between volunteering and activism.
For the rest of the semester, I focused on activism, both to prepare the students for their experiences and because the students were largely unfamiliar with the history and practice of activism. We dabbled in various sections of Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists, a marvelous little 1970 book from the Sierra Club, which highlights college students’ environmental activism. I used the book to show my students that other people their age have been successful activists — that they really can change the world.
Then we dove headfirst into our final book for the semester: Starhawk’s Webs of Power: Notes From the Global Uprising. A brilliant and thrilling account of both the dangers and rewards of activism, Webs of Power was also the inspiration for another course requirement: the completion of a journal about their activism. To prove they had completed their 10 hours of service, the students were assigned a one-page journal entry for each hour, the first half of the entry detailing their experience and the second half relating that experience to class material.
Then, a few weeks later, it was time for the students to start their 10 hours of activism — and the trouble began.
To begin with, students simply could not grasp the conceptual difference between activism and volunteering, despite all our discussions and readings about the distinctions between the two. I explained — in the classroom, online, and during office hours — that while volunteering involves giving one’s time to help an organization, an activist lobbies for change, educates and gains the support of the public on an issue, and then uses that support to make reforms.
Their difficulties were further compounded when they found organizations that had both activist and volunteer positions available, and the students had to convey to the contact person the necessity of getting the activist position. In many ways, the assignment required our community’s activist organizations’ participation, especially given the rural nature of the college’s location. But while the local domestic-abuse shelter was eager to take recruits, the less-local animal-rights organization, where most of my students wanted to fulfill their hours, spent most of its time trying to persuade my students to become vegans.
Another obstacle I ran into all semester was a general apathy among the students, manifested in their procrastination and lack of interest. True activists are activists because of a deep-seated passion and world view. People without that core commitment do not make good activists, and struggle to connect with those who do. Most of my students did not express interest in or concern for any issue, not even the rather “in” topic of environmental activism, and therefore had no motivation to work for change.
Given all that, it was probably too much to hope that my students would all come back as full-fledged activists — but I was naïve.
The day the students turned in their activist journals, I asked them to share and evaluate their experiences. Then I posed a question that, in retrospect, I should have raised much earlier in the semester: Why did I have them be activists rather than volunteers? Some students quickly answered that activism was challenging, took them out of their comfort zones, and allowed them to apply class material in real life. However, all but one acknowledged that given the choice, they would have preferred to complete their hours volunteering instead. There, in a nutshell, was the reason I had required 10 hours of activism: Had I not done so, most of my students would never have tried it.
I required activism not to make my students do something they didn’t want to do but because of its long and prominent history in the United States. As a class, we studied the impact of activists on the civil rights of African-Americans, environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender movement. None of the changes inspired by those movements would have occurred without activism.
Yet sadly but unsurprisingly, upon reading their journals, I found that only one student had dedicated more than 10 hours to activism (she did 11.5); most students completed between 9 and 9.5 hours. I also had a number of students whose hours did not come close to meeting the requirement. One used six of the 10 hours for drive time. (She knew that I would only allow two — a concession to the fact that our college is in a remote town at least 40 minutes away from any major activist opportunities — but she apparently thought that if she chose somewhere even farther away, I would make an exception for her.) Three students started their own activist organization, then spent an hour throwing a Frisbee in the park and an hour celebrating their accomplishments. Another taught Sunday school (not activism) at a Buddhist temple and handed in a detailed description of the temple instead of an activist’s journal.
I know that I cannot create in students the passion to be activists. But requiring 10 hours did, at least, give every student the opportunity to experience it. And someday, when they find something they are passionate about, they’ll know how to get involved — and they’ll do so because they want to.
Requiring students to participate in activism came with its own share of trouble and conflict, yet my class syllabus will always have an activist component. I still hope that one day I won’t have to make activism a requirement in order for my students to try it.
Ivy A. Helman is a graduate student in women’s studies in religion at Claremont Graduate University. This essay refers to her experience as an adjunct lecturer in first-year studies and religion at Carroll University, in Waukesha, Wis.
http://chronicle.com Section: Commentary Volume 55, Issue 8, Page A36