“How to Use Democracy” Videos as a Tool to Engage General Education Students

29 January 2020, Version 1
This content is an early or alternative research output and has not been peer-reviewed at the time of posting.

Abstract

Political Science classrooms often treat justice as a natural outcome of democratic political institutions and processes. This paper highlights an assignment that asks students to produce a video explaining how-to use democracy to achieve justice. Students are required to identify an injustice, research causes and solutions, and present the information in a how-to video publicly available on YouTube. While doing the assignment, students explore the multiple options available to produce social change. This paper presents the scaffolded assignment components and assesses civic engagement outcomes using a pre and post survey administered to two sections of the course taught by the same instructor with only one section completing the video assignment. Results suggest that the video assignment required students to examine more closely the structural explanations for injustice as well as increased their sense of personal responsibility when witnessing injustice.

Keywords

TLC2020
General Ed and Interdisciplinary Learning

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.