Recap from the "Let's Get Critical" post: in addition to being full-time college students, Harpswell girls critically analyze current events almost every day, whether through written CD summaries or formal CD presentations.
The demanding expectations of Harpswell's curriculum must work around each girl's university schedule. My own schedule, then, looks like I took a typical 9-to-5 agenda that was put through a shredder and rearranged into random hours of the day. I might have 7:30am English tutoring, then nothing until 1pm resume advice, and then CD prep and presentations from 6pm-11pm.
The other night I came back from a night out to have a CD meeting. A discussion about Uganda scamming relief aid for refugees will sober you up, in every sense of the word.
Harpswell further offers a core curriculum on top of CD responsibilities. By the time they graduate, the girls have taken LR-taught courses in Health and Nutrition, Debate, Analytical Writing, Comparative Genocide Studies, and Civic Engagement. I get to lead the latter class for the third-years. Juniors are the best students: they've grown wise from some first-year follies, but they're still safe from senioritis.
Our first civic engagement class began by finding a group definition of "community." We discussed our memberships in a range of communities, from our dorm rooms to our global identities. The theme of civic engagement encourages us to recognize our responsibility and power to make change as social entrepreneurs. Check out the brainstorming below:
Listing out challenges to communities was an unfortunately effortless exercise. Each girl grabbed the marker at least once to share an issue that makes them passionate.
This core curriculum class will do more than lecture about engaging with social change: the girls will divide up into teams to create and present project proposals, and then raise funds to put them into action. Already, there are ideas to travel to the provinces and share the importance of higher education, to raise awareness about water sanitation, and to connect
The class emphasizes themes of resilience, empathy, and innovation. Under the broad title of "civic engagement," I make sure to cover all of the pre-designed material about affecting social change and how to construct project proposals. However, I've found a little bit of wiggle room in the lesson plans to open up discussions about little things like sexual health or feminism. I figure that if I'm teaching about passion and creativity, going on a tangent or two helps me lead by example.
