Do Something About It! A Self-Directed Civic Engagement Project

If there was ever a world that needed the help of an empowered generation, it is the world we live in today. The Do Something About It (#DoSomethingAboutItProject) self-directed civic engagement project invites students to exercise their personal agency in order to make a positive impact on an issue of significance to them.

The Logistics:

The project is completely self directed, not only in terms of choosing a topic, but also in determining what the project will look like. The only requirement is that the student attempt to engage his local, national, or global community in an effort to exert a positive influence on an existing issue. The students:  

• design and pitch the project,
  
• co-create the assessment criteria,
  
• determine the value of the project (from 5% to 15%), and even 
  
• co-assess their success according to the assessment rubric that they helped design.
  

Project concepts and approaches can vary greatly depending on the issue, the stakeholders involved, and the talents and abilities of the students. A list of potential concepts and ideas are included below, but these should only be used to get the imagination going - not to set parameters on the activities that might be pursued within this initiative. Students can consider (but are by no means limited to) pursuing the following activities: 

• publishing an article
  
• filming and posting an interview (or interviews)
  
• writing a letter to the editor
  
• setting up a meeting with a politician
  
• starting a letter writing campaign
  
• starting a fundraiser
  
• starting an online petition (ex. www.change.org, www.sumofus.org, www.thepetitionsite.com)
  
• establishing a website to raise awareness, gather information, or pool resources
  
• establishing a philanthropic initiative (ex. Africycle, MeToWe)
• starting a social awareness campaign (ex. Pink Shirt Day)
• performing and publishing a primary study (survey, video-poll, etc.) 

From the Formative to the Summative

Students are invited to embark on this initiative early on in the academic year. Students will meet regularly with the course instructor in order to discuss their progress as well as the various roadblocks that they will invariably encounter along the way. In fact, a critical aspect of this project is its inherent tendency to provide students with regular and unanticipated challenges. How students confront and adjust to these challenges will factor heavily on both the success of the initiative as well as the academic project. As the project is ongoing, it will undoubtedly evolve as the year progresses. For this reason, it will not be assessed summatively until very near the end of the academic year. As such, it will count as part of the final 30% of the course evaluation. Given that the value of this project is adjustable, it will have an inverse influence on the value of the final exam: the more the project is worth, the less the exam will be worth, and vice versa.

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Art Lightstone

Project Weighting Options
Option A:	5% Project	25% Exam

Option B:

10% Project

20% Exam

Option C:

15% Project

15% Exam

Consider implementing a project like this in your school, and help your students discover that they can indeed do something about it!