Stephen Bloch-Schulman

Stephen Bloch-Schulman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elon University. His engaged work with students covers a wide range of justice issues. “Ethical Practice” and “Women, Gender, and Sexuality” are among the courses in which he incorporates civic engagement.

1. Why did you choose to ask students to do civic engagement projects?

I cannot imagine a better way to help them learn. Unlike having a discussion in the classroom, where students (and we all) put on a kind of contemplative aloofness, where we sit back and consider without much weight to that consideration, engaging in civic projects requires commitment. I think an example is in order. When student talk about ethics in class, they often espouse a certain kind of relativism that goes something like this: “we all have a right to our opinions.” And what they tell me they mean is that no one should be telling anyone else what to do. I understand and respect the desire for students to be modest about what we can tell others, ethically, and to respect others’ ideas. But that is not how they live (actually, it is not how anyone I know lives). When we get out into the field, they have very strong feelings about what is right and wrong, and about who is and who is not making the situation (whatever situation) better or worse. I am not suggesting that one view is better than the other. I am suggesting that we all (well…. at least the students I work with, and me, too) have both as part of our thinking. Without understanding that, we cannot really understand ourselves as moral beings.

2. Which of your courses get students out of the classroom?

I would say that I don’t think through an “in the classroom/out of the classroom” dichotomy. I think much of the most important civic learning can happen within a classroom when students, for example, have to make committed choices, and in particular, committed choices in the face of real costs. I taught an Ethical Practice class recently where the theme was the ethical and political usefulness of trust and distrust. When we were reading about trust, students worked on a blog, modeled after the Humans of New York blog, called Humans of Alamance County, (https://www.pinterest.com/humansofAC/portraits/) where they interviewed and took pictures of folks on and off campus to practice the civic virtues of talking to strangers (this idea comes from Danielle Allen’s book, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (2004)). The students then worked with another class to create a “roundtable” of blog posts on another topic and had to curate the other class’s blog posts, deciding which of the more than 30 would be included in the roundtable. This was an exercise, no less than the Humans of Alamance County project, in creating trust: the goal was to create a process where some people would inevitably not get what they wanted (having one’s blog included in the final roundtable came with a small grade bump), and yet, to make it clear how the process could be trusted even in the face of the large number of people who would not be getting what they wanted. I saw these two as connected and both were building upon the same set of pedagogical goals, even though one might have been considered “inside the classroom” and the other “outside the classroom.”

3. What project(s) do your students do?

It is hard to say what they do, in general, because this is really determined by the particular pedagogical goals that I (and often they) have for the class. In the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies class I am teaching now, students will be writing and performing monologues in our campus coffee shop at night. This will allow us to engage our campus in a larger conversation about feminism and about the experiences of women and how they experience and try to work to ameliorate gender injustice. This was fitting for the class because the theme of the class is the bringing together of personal experiences and feminist theory, and their monologues will do just that. I also work with students on more typical civic engagement projects; for example, in several classes I have taught (or co-taught) students have been involved with the Participatory Budgeting process in Greensboro.

4. Give an example of a successful project.

A group of students did a project that won the Thomas Barnett “Breaking Down Barriers” Scholarship. The scholarship is “$1,000 to be awarded annually to one Elon undergraduate who successfully completes a high-quality project on a topic related to improving the university experience of students with disabilities.” Here was the description of their project:

2013 Winner: Emily Steiner, Amy Zemanick and Amelia Maki with Jess McDonald and Katie Atkins. Accessibility@Elon is a student-led activist project completed as part of Dr. Stephen Bloch-Schulman’s Spring 2012 section of the Women’s/Gender studies capstone course, “Current Controversies in Feminism.” The project was informed by a class module on Disability Studies and group members’ personal experiences with disability, as well as conversations with Disability Services Coordinator Susan Wise, other students with disabilities, and professors invested in accessibility issues. The goal of the project was to raise awareness of disability, accessibility, and Disability Services on Elon University’s campus. There were many facets to this project including a publicity campaign to promote Disability Services, which included table tents in dining halls, a Pendulum article, and a social media campaign; an assessment and evaluation of Elon’s accessible parking, resulting in new signage; a film showing of Neurotypical, a documentary made from the perspectives of people with autism; letters to administrators notifying them of our concerns related to accessibility on campus; and a “Challenge Ableism” photo and flyer campaign highlighting disability/accessibility issues on campus that was displayed in its entirety in Belk Library, the Center for the Arts, and Lindner Hall, with individual photo also posted around campus.

These students then took their $1000 and used it as seed money to bring Eli Claire, a disability activist and scholar, to campus to speak about disability issues on campus.

5. What do you think students gain from doing this civic engagement?

See my answer to question 1.

6. What does the civic engagement project offer to wider communities?

I think the answer is really dependent on the particular project. Because the projects that I work on with students are so course specific, and because I rarely teach courses in the same way, there isn’t really one answer.

7. If someone wanted to do these projects at their own institution, what steps or resources would you recommend?

I think the most important thing is for a faculty member to start really early and to build lasting relationships with partners and allies. I don’t think this needs to happen off campus: campuses have great need for civic engagement, too. But I have found that the more I am in touch with potential partners and allies, the more options emerge. I also think flexibility (on my part and on the students’ part) is absolutely critical. None of the projects that I engage with are projects that involve punching a clock: they are project based, and these can easily chance on a moment’s notice and can require time and energy that cannot be planned for. And they also can fail or dissolve quite quickly (a problem that a group is working on can become moot, or fixed, or intractable, or hostile, etc.).

8. What do you like about teaching this way?

Again, I would go back to my answer to the first question. I think it leads to the best learning for the students I work with. It is also powerful, fun, hard as all get-out, and nerve-wracking. Did I mention fun? It is.

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