Most of the teaching I have done is related to social problems and violence.
As part of educating students to participate a democratic society, I think it is
important to try to convey some sense of what problems we are facing, how large
they are, and how complicated they can be.
At times, this enlightenment
does not raise their consciousness in a way that pulls at their conscience and
motivates them to do something. Indeed, understanding the structural elements of
a social problem and their pervasiveness can cause students to feel disempowered,
alienated, cynical and depressed.
A class specifically on Violence &
Society can provide a forum for needed discussions and solutions, although it
could just as easily put all of the students into therapy and add to the number
of people on Prozac.
I am increasingly incorporating the search for
solutions into my teaching and thought I would go the next step with this class.
Why have them do the research and write a paper that would be thrown out or simply
filed away?
Resources for this project were collected by students in Paul's
Violence & Society class - including some who had very little computer
experience. Karen McKie learned FrontPage and turned those resources into a
webpage. Paul learned FrontPage to prepare the page for publication on the web
and he updates it.
From March until August 2000, the STOP VIOLENCE Project was part
of PaulsJusticePage. In July, Paul
purchased the domain name stopviolence.com and transferred the pages here. I should
recognize my institution, Eastern Michigan University for several
contributions. I was selected for their Instructional Technology Across
the Curriculum Workshop in 2000 and 2001. Also, part of a Faculty Research
Fellowship was used to expand several topics.
