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Community or Experiential Learning
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 14:49:58 -0500
From: parker@powernet.net
In my American Government class I require each student to attend one local public meeting of a governmental agency. Here in the Reno-Sparks-Lake Tahoe-Carson City region, there is a wide variety of public meetings available nearly every day, each week and each month. There is no problem finding a meeting near any student's residence. This is put forth as one of their written assignments, to report on who, what, where, and did anything happen in these meetings.
Another assignment is to monitor a political figure, at either the national, state, or local level, for two months and report on their activities, effectiveness, efforts, achievements and failures. This to give them some ideal of what politicians really do and how difficult it is, sometimes, to judge their actions based on limited exposure and momentary sound bites in the media.
At the same time, I have guest speakers come in and tell of their experiences dealing with government at the state level; lobbying for increased funding for programs, opposing legislative efforts, encouraging activeism within the system, etc.
I try to show, in the course of my lectures, the inter-relationship and the similarities between national, state, and local government. Hopefully, some of my students will finish the class with a hightened awareness of what they, as individuals and in groups, can do to promote better government and services.
Jerry Parker
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Teaching Politics is published by William J. Ball (ball@tcnj.edu)
