The article by the assistant professor of sociology demonstrates an exercise that instructors can use to teach students how to call their representatives, and presents evidence of the activity's effectiveness.
Raj Ghoshal, assistant professor of sociology, published, “Call Your Representatives: Connecting Classroom Learning to Real-World Policy Action” in the January 2019 issue of the journal Teaching Sociology.
Ghoshal began teaching students how to call an elected official to express their perspective on any course-related issue in 2017, in his Criminology and Rethinking Race classes. Throughout that year he studied students’ participation and perceptions of the activity.
The article showcases the method he uses, which includes preparing students in advance, giving them wide latitude in topic choice, openly discussing anxiety, modeling an example call, and having students call during class time. It also presents qualitative and quantitative evidence from anonymous feedback surveys showing that most students made calls and that their civic comfort and self-reported likelihood of contacting an elected official again in the future grew significantly due to the exercise.
The article is Ghoshal’s third publication in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL); prior efforts in this field have addressed teaching about implicit bias and teaching students how to conduct online audit studies of discrimination. His work on the paper was partly supported by Elon’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ryan Johnson also contributed to the initial exercise design.