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FACILITATING CITIZENSHIP THROUGH TEACHING ACTION RESEARCH: AN UNDERGRADUATE COURSE AS AN ACTION RESEARCH INTERVENTION
| Title: | FACILITATING CITIZENSHIP THROUGH TEACHING ACTION RESEARCH: AN UNDERGRADUATE COURSE AS AN ACTION RESEARCH INTERVENTION |
| Author: | Thomas, Jill C. |
| Description: | For years, psychologists have been encouraged to acknowledge the political implications of the values inherent in their work and to embrace their professional duty to be socially responsible through activism. One potential avenue for psychologists to affect social change is through teaching socially responsible courses. Despite a movement within advanced learning institutions to emphasize community service as a valuable aspect of higher education, current college students appear to be much less invested than their predecessors in the social-political process. Some suggest that this problem may be addressed by implementing more global educational interventions that result in the development of a deeper sense of citizenship in students. Such interventions aim to help students explicitly identify their values, teach students to understand the context and origins of their beliefs as well as to hold them as tentative, promote interconnectedness and cooperation, and result in changes in thinking, feeling, and action. These aims are consistent with the tenets of Experiential Personal Construct Psychology (EPCP) and Archetypal Psychology (AP), which provide the theoretical framework for the present study. In EPCP, reverence for self and other marks the pinnacle of healthy functioning, and acts of citizenship can be seen as an outgrowth of such reverence. AP, on the other hand, emphasizes connection to the realm beyond human relations as the basis for one’s sense of responsibility to the community. Through its focus on appreciating the subjectivity of all beings, AP stresses the need to more deeply respect and care for the world we live in. The present study describes the process and outcomes of an undergraduate course aimed at promoting psychological and political health through a socially responsible educational intervention. Through the course, students learned about action research and eating disorders and worked in three small groups to design and implement participatory action research (PAR) projects to address problematic aspects of campus culture related to disordered eating and body image. Qualitative descriptions and evocative texts are used to present students’ experiences. In addition, students’ PAR projects are described. Finally, the process of teaching the course is illustrated and suggestions and implications are offered. |
| Permanent Link: |
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1151511852
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/19065 |
| Date: | 2007 |
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