CSP students take a sequence of four courses (one each semester) that center on work with local community organizations from an asset-based perspective:

• Learning through Community Engagement: The Good Society  SRVCLRNG 293H
• Tools for Democratic Change  SRVCLRNG 393TH
• Public Policy and Citizen Action  PUBHLTH 499N
• Organizing: People, Power, and Change  PUBHLTH 499O

These courses satisfy four of the six required courses for the certificate in civic engagement and public service and other university and departmental requirements.

Students typically spend 4 or more hours/week in community work over the two years in CSP.

Students work together with community members on community-identified goals. They critically examine what constitutes just and effective community engagement and root causes of systemic injustice—learning through action, reflection, connection to course content, and other sources. 

CSP Course Descriptions

SRVCLRNG 293H, Learning through Community Engagement: The Good Society 4 credits

This is the first of four courses in the Community Scholars Program. In this course, students are encouraged to unleash their imaginations to envision the social structures that would characterize a truly good society. Students will explore themes that cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and other aspects of social identity and will examine case studies and cross-cultural models that will help to generate ideas about equitable and sustainable ways of structuring societies. Pedagogically, the course is driven by an strengths-based approach that enables students to build on and benefit from every individual’s potential, both in the classroom and in collaboration with community members. 

Throughout this course (and throughout each of the following three courses), each student will participate in a weekly community work. Preparing for and learning from these experiences will be a major component of the course. This course satisfies the General Education requirements SB and U. 

SRVCLRNG 393TH: Tools for Democratic Change 4 credits

Tools for Change: Theorizing Possibility  is the second course in a four-course sequence that collectively make up the Community Scholars Program. The course will begin with an interrogation of what we mean by “theory” and what theories can offer to the work of social change. We will build on your study last semester of examples of good societies, and move on to learning about theoretical frameworks, discourses and approaches that offer visions of social justice and liberation. We will look at theories that touch upon decolonization, feminist theory, the Black Radical Imagination, and science fiction.

PUBHLTH 499N: Public Policy and Citizen Action 4 credits

This course is the first in a two-semester sequence that makes up your capstone year. While this semester we will deal mainly with policy as a tool for social change and next semester we will focus on community organizing, at its core these courses together deal with the power and complications of different frameworks for change. This semester, we will explore the ways that U.S. public and social policy forms a critical part of the context of our social and political life, the complexities and contradictions of policy as a tool to ameliorate (as opposed to eradicate) social inequity and, given those complexities and contradictions, the degree to which policy has or has not been able to create lasting social change.

This course fulfills the first semester of the honors thesis/project requirement. 

PUBHLTH 499O: Organizing: People, Power, and Change 4 credits

This class provides an opportunity to understand the role of community organizing in social change, how organizing is connected to movement building, and how it differs (or overlaps with, or is connected to) advocacy and activism. The goal of this course is to provide you with the basics of the theory of organizing as well as case study examples of organizing, in practice, throughout history. We will examine specific organizing cases including the Labor Movement, Indigenous movements for “Land Back,” The United Farmworkers Movement and the  Reproductive Justice Movement. 

This course fulfills the second semester of the honors thesis/project requirement.