I feel emboldened in the current political moment about teaching abolition. Abolition is always on my syllabi, but usually my students have never heard of it and resist a lot, so I have to strategize carefully how to introduce and build the ideas. This year is different! Our own City Council is getting ready to fire cops, our public school system has kicked out the cops, the police union was expelled from the largest labor group, and no matter how limited my students’ media silo, they must be aware of the work happening to defund cops and separate cops from many institutions. So I have created a full-class group project that I hope will give them a chance to deeply chew on these ideas and learn how grassroots work for abolition happens.
Here is the syllabus for the class this assignment is for.
Here is the assignment:
Group Project: Plan a Campaign to End SU Collaboration with SPD and Eliminate Campus Security
Learning Objectives:
- Experience working in a group, paying attention to group dynamics, working to establish a group culture of collaboration, sharing work, meeting facilitation, interest in one another’s participation, generative disagreements, and consensus-building.
- Understand what is required to build shared messaging, to develop coalitions, to plan attention-getting actions, and to apply pressure in order to win campaign goals.
- Write effective, understandable campaign messaging in multiple forms (op-eds, memes, flyers, etc.).
- Understand how police and prison abolition efforts are undertaken.
- Understand how law and law enforcement systems are changed through grassroots organizing.
For the purposes of this assignment, the members of our class constitute a student activist organization on the Seattle U campus. Inspired by the global rebellion against racist policing in the summer of 2020, you all came together to work on breaking ties between SU and SPD, and getting rid of campus security. Now you are planning your campaign to do so. This document and this toolkit will be useful resources.
Your group will meet weekly for an hour during the semester during our Monday class times (excluding the first Monday of the semester).
- I will attend the first meeting to support you all in putting various structures in place for your meetings and answer any questions.
- At each meeting, you will need two facilitators, a note taker, and a time-keeper. These roles must rotate between you as much as possible. It is helpful to create a schedule for these roles at the beginning of the project so people can anticipate their duties and be prepared.
- 24 hours before each meeting, the facilitators must circulate a draft agenda for the meeting to all participants so that participants can give feedback, and ask for items to be added to the agenda. Facilitators assess requests, estimate times for each agenda item, decide what can wait until the following meeting if there are too many items on the agenda. Please cc me on these emails.
- Agendas and notes should be kept in a shared folder, through Google Drive or another service. Please give me access to this folder.
- Your meetings should always include a check-in about timelines and tasks so that you can speak directly to each other about progress in the work and share any feedback or concerns you have with each other and do any planning needed to ensure everything is moving along.
- You should form teams to take on particular parts of the campaign development work. You can adjust those teams as you go—you may choose to meld or further split teams as the work requires. You can use some of your weekly whole-group meeting time to do small group meetings, but you also want to make sure to use the whole-group time to ensure that everyone knows what all the teams are doing and is making any decisions that require the whole group together. For example, the whole-group meetings might be a time to discuss drafts that have been circulated of written materials or graphics created by a team.
By the end of the project, the group should produce the items below. The due date for all of these deliverables is December 3. You will have 30 minutes to present them in class on that day in addition to turning in the finished products.
- A 4-5 page persuasive research paper about SU’s relationship with SPD, and about SU’s campus police, supporting the campaign. This document should be written to an audience of students, faculty, staff and administrators at SU who you hope to win over to your aims, as well as the broader Seattle Community from whom you hope to garner support for the campaign. This document is where more detailed information and analysis that supports the campaign lives, since social media posts and other aspects of the website have shorter persuasive information.
- A plan for building a coalition of other organizations and groups who would back your campaign and how you would work with that coalition to win. Who would you reach out to? Why? How would you talk to those you are reaching out to about joining the coalition? What timeline would you give yourselves for doing that? How many people from your group would it take?
- A 1-2 minute video aimed at making the SU community aware of your campaign and convincing people to back your demands.
- Plan for a social media campaign (including to raise awareness about your concerns and pressure the SU administration to concede to your demands).
- A website for your campaign that includes your video, graphics from your social media campaign, your persuasive research paper, a FAQ about your campaign, and anything else you think would be beneficial. You might look at these campaigns’ websites to see examples: No New Women’s Prison, No New Youth Jail, No Cop Academy, Shut Down the NWDC .
- A plan for some kind of online or live direct action to pressure the SU administration to concede to your demands.
Along the way, the group should produce:
- By September 10, a schedule for each of the different deliverables drafting and editing processes and a roster of the teams that will be working on each element. This is a living document that you can change and adjust as you go.
- By September 13, a plan for how to do the research needed and the timeline for that research, how it will be shared with the group by those who do the research, and what follow up will occur to address unanswered or new questions that emerge. This plan must be shared with me.
- By September 20, research being generated by the researchers should be available to those making the social media campaign and video, through presentations, discussions and/or public notes, so that those pieces of the work can be developed alongside the research paper. The written elements of this research should also be shared with me.
- By September 27, a draft plan for building a coalition and working with that coalition to win your demands.
- By October 11, a first draft of your group research paper to be circulated among you for comments. By October 26, a draft that incorporates those changes is due to me.
- By November 1, an initial written proposal to the group regarding your direct action, to be discussed by the group in one or more whole-group meetings until you settle on a plan.
- By October 18, a draft video script to be circulated to the group for comments/improvements. Please share this draft with me.
- By October 18, a draft social media plan to be circulated to the group for comments/improvements.
- By October 25, an “elevator pitch” script draft that you can all use to talk to potential coalition partners or anyone you’re introducing to the campaign to be circulated to the group for comments/improvements.
Each week that one of these drafts are due, you must post the draft by 10am on the Monday of that week, and I will attend the beginning of your whole group meeting that day at 1:30 to give you feedback.
Additionally, each of you will write two 300-word reflections over the course of the semester on how the campaign is going, with a focus on group dynamics and collaboration. These are due to me on September 14 and October 19. These reflections should consider questions such as:
- How would I describe the group’s culture? Look at this chart to think about examples of qualities a group’s culture might have. What do I like about it and what would I like to see shift? Are there ways I could help it shift?
- How am I participating in the group? Do I feel like I might be over- or under-participating? How do I feel when I participate? How do I feel after? How would I like to feel when I participate?
- Are there people I wish I could hear more from in the group? How could I help them to participate more?
- Are there any stuck roles emerging in the group that are making workload uneven, or making some people’s presence more dominant or more invisible?
- What lessons am I learning about participating in groups?
- How is group decision-making going? What principles from our readings about consensus decision-making do I see at play?
- How is meeting facilitation going? What tips from our readings on meeting facilitation have been useful? What am I learning about facilitating meetings?
At the end of the semester, you will each provide a two-sentence (minimum) assessment for every other student in the group that includes the best qualities and contributions they brought to the group and areas for improvements and reflection.
