In fall 2020, I re-designed the course I was teaching to take place entirely online. I wrote, in detail, about the course in a series of blog posts (part 1, part 2, the assignments, the main project, and the content 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I taught that course for 4 semesters, and have since […]
Real power. The power to make decisions. For 15 years, I’ve described the work I do as youth community organizing, or youth participatory democracy. The idea at first was to get young people more involved in the public sphere, some ideal of more democratic governance and activist young people. Increasingly, it has become crystal clear […]
Whether self-help or helping profession, the act of improving the human and their well-being will become increasingly relegated to the efforts of algorithms. ChatGPT and its siblings are merely the latest and most visible actors in this game. The use of robots to provide physical help and company to the elderly, apps that surveil and […]
I teach bachelors and masters social work students, who by and large enter the profession with eyes wide open to the challenges our profession manages, which they encounter daily, while face to face with clients who are involved in a Sisyphean struggle against the forces of capitalism, racism, colonialism, etc. that place a person in […]
We’ve been taught that a cornerstone of good teaching, workshop, and group practice is creating community ground rules or guidelines. The theory is something like: If we create some rules together, we’re more likely to stick to them, and we can do better at creating a safe space. The approach is something like: Collectively discuss […]
On Saturday, my students and I borrowed a framework for considering our work with ideas, ourselves, or clients, whether clinically or at the macro level. We were discussing an article differentiating Espoused Theory from Theory-in-Use. The notion here is also core to the commonly discussed, though less commonly understood, concept of “praxis” or reflection-in-action. Espoused […]
The Class Log is a document that you will use over the course of the semester to log your in-class activities, preparing for class activities, and to keep your Process Log. You should have a minimum of one entry per week for the duration of the semester (15 weeks), plus any additional logs for second class […]
This is another post in my series on developing my Adolescent and Youth Development for Youthworkers class as an online course for this fall. The series begins with Part 1. The last 6 posts about this teaching transition have been about course content. They are: Content Updates Chapter 1 – Ourselves as Youth Chapter 2 […]
This is another post in my series on developing my Adolescent and Youth Development for Youthworkers class as an online course for this fall. The series begins with Part 1. This is “Chapter” 5 of the interactive and experiential OER I will develop with my students this fall. This will likely be module 5 / […]
This is another post in my series on developing my Adolescent and Youth Development for Youthworkers class as an online course for this fall. The series begins with Part 1. This is “Chapter” 4 of the interactive and experiential OER I will develop with my students this fall. This will likely be module 4 / […]