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Developed by Andrea Macguire, University of Michigan
STEP 1: THINK ABOUT HOW TO BE MOST EFFECTIVE ON YOUR CAMPUS
- How many departments, schools, and professors you want to involve?
- How many different components can you feasibly plan?
- Do you want to have it occur all on one day, or over a longer time period? (It may be helpful to do it over a week so that it is more flexible for professors.)
STEP 2: GET FACULTY ON BOARD
- Start with your personal faculty contacts and ask for their participation. Instead of sending mass emails initially, have students ask their current professors in person, and get names of faculty who care about environmental issues and may be more receptive.
- Once you have a large enough list of faculty, then send invitation emails to all faculty, include your list of participating faculty and sponsoring departments. This helps to convince other faculty that your teach-in is worthwhile and is going to happen. Professors who are enthusiastic about the Teach-in to can also ask their colleagues to participate.
- Don’t just send emails; pass out fliers in faculty mailboxes, make phone calls, and ask them in person, and make sure to follow-up.
- Contact the deans of the schools, and ask them to send an email out to faculty encouraging participation –drafting the email usually helps.
- It also helps to have someone at an even higher level encouraging faculty participation…like the university president, or provosts, etc. Just ask for them to send a simple email out to deans and faculty. Make it as easy for them as possible.
STEP 3: PREPARE TEACH-IN MATERIALS
- Create a powerpoint with basic facts, graphs and pictures, as well as a next steps slide for further action. Encourage professors to take at least10-15 minutes at the beginning/end of one of their lectures to present the powerpoint and add something relevant to their class and climate change. If you have enough students helping with the teach-in, you can create specific powerpoints for different disciplines. Make sure to include discussion questions…this is the most important part so that students are engaged. Have the last slide advertise other teach-in events
- Create a pamphlet with more information to hand out to the class when the professor presents.
- Have a student representative visit the classes and say something/pass out fliers advertising events and other ways to get involved, or even to present the powerpoint, if the professor would prefer it done that way.
STEP 4: COORDINATE
- Have 1 or 2 people in charge of coordinating the teach-in for each department (or for a few of them if departments are small). They will be in charge of contacting the professors, following up, delivering materials, and keeping track of the schedule. Also, they will make sure there is a student present at the lecture when it happens. It helps to get students who are part of the department/ college already.
- Have a few people in charge of the overall coordination, and keep track of all of the departments/people who are involved.
- This teach-in model will be most effective if there is a large group of students volunteering to make it happen. Each person does not have to do a big chunk of work, but the key is to reach out to every single professor on campus.
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