Changemaking Education: sparks a sense of agency in students and provides real-life opportunities to understand problems and practice creating positive social and environmental change.  

MDC / iCED

Facts

• Community college
• 8 campuses
• 100,000+ students
• Student profile – working, struggling, distracted, not from “culture” of voting, first generation, immigrants, 25%+ not US citizen, often don’t pay attention to politics or know basic information
• iCED offices on all eight campuses
• Voter engagement = core program of iCED
• FT faculty teach 5-8 courses a term
• MDC Learning Outcome #6 (personal, civic, & social responsibility

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mdc.edu/vote

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Faculty Professional Development Workshop Process

Prepare and submit proposal for approval

• Title
• Description
• Rationale
• Audience
• Requested Hours
• Objectives
• Plan of Evaluation
• When Offered
• Presenter(s)

Fostering Voter Engagement Across All Disciplines

• Audience – All FT & PT faculty
• Requested Hours – 2 (1.5 + homework)
• Plan of Evaluation – create “election-ready” module

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Fostering Voter Engagement Across All Disciplines

Description: A fundamental responsibility of Miami Dade College, and higher education in general, is to prepare students to become responsible, thoughtful, engaged citizens in our democracy. This includes, most importantly, our collective right and duty to register and to vote. Faculty from all disciplines will learn new information and easy-to-use strategies that will help every MDC student become election ready – including registering to vote and/or checking registration status, election deadlines, Vote by Mail directions, finding non-partisan information about candidates and ballot issues, making a plan to vote, and much more. The workshop will share activities to help students understand, in a non-partisan manner, why their vote is important and will address barriers that prevent them from voting. Participants will also learn the many ways students who aren’t eligible to vote can still be involved. As a result of this workshop, faculty will create an easy to implement plan to help their students be election ready.

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Welcome!

How do students decide to vote (or not)?

Empowering students to be election ready means:

1. Helping students understand why it is important to vote
2. Helping students locate the resources to get informed
3. Removing barriers to their access to vote
4. Helping students make a plan to vote

BE ELECTION READY! LESSON PLAN

Faculty Name:

Campus:

Vision for Election Readiness at MDC: Students will be able to create a strategy for fulfilling their civic responsibility to vote (or if ineligible, helping others vote) by first making the personal connection to why voting is important, then by learning about how to vote, and finally by making a plan to vote in the General Election. (Learning Outcome #6 – personal, social, and civic responsibility)

1. Which of your course competencies could be connected to election readiness?
2. Which MDC Learning Outcomes could be tied to election readiness (#6, but are there others you’d want to include?)?
3. How might you incorporate election readiness into your course? And how might you tie your assignment(s) to course competencies and/or MDC Learning Outcomes identified above? Which of the following might you use, and how:

____ Introduce www.mdc.edu/vote page (including videos)

____ Election Readiness Worksheet Assignment

____ Election Readiness Quiz (via Blackboard)

____ Elected Officials Worksheet Assignment

____ Have Students Attend an MDC Election Ready 60-minute Webinar (offered bi-weekly all term)

____ Inviting Guest Speaker from Engage Miami or iCED

____ Other assignments

Description:

4. How will your election readiness assignment be incorporated into your course? (e.g., assignment as part of an in-class lesson; out of class assignment; extra credit assignment, etc.)
5. How will you assess that your students are election ready?
6. What questions do you have and how can iCED be helpful to you?

Josh Young

Director, Institute for Civic Engagement & Democracy

Miami Dade College

jyoung@mdc.edu / 305-237-7477

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