Challenges from COVID-19 were especially severe for teaching classes about civic engagement and organizing. Students who were previously instructed to practice the knowledge and skills learned in their communities were forced to move to e-learning. How can instructors teach civic engagement through distance learning? This article uses a class I taught during spring 2020, “People Power Change: Leadership as a Practice,” to demonstrate the use of a “three-H approach.” This approach focused on students’ head, heart, and hands through public narratives, strategizing, and taking action while also reexamining disruptions as opportunities.
The costs associated with decision making could cause students to settle in inertia without continually searching for the optimal state (Porter Reference Porter1991), particularly when there is no external stimulus (Carden and Wood Reference Carden and Wood2018). External shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, provided excellent opportunities for experimentation, innovation, and re-optimization (Acuto Reference Acuto2020; Dias et al. Reference Dias, Farquharson, Griffith, Joyce and Levell2020), especially when previously devised plans were no longer viable.
In this course, which originated from Dr. Marshall Ganz’s famous organizing class at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 17 first- to third-year students were divided into five teams. They were asked to accept responsibility for enabling others to achieve a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty and to make real changes in the world (Ganz Reference Ganz2012). Students were required to build social capital and create leadership teams, strategize to devise actionable plans, and then execute those plans outside of the classroom. Merely studying the course material would not be sufficient; they needed to “get their hands dirty.”
Before COVID-19 forced our school to move all teaching online, all but one leadership team in the class had planned their activities on campus; the remaining team had envisioned a project that empowered the local community beyond the university. Then COVID-19 shut down the university and forced us to switch to remote e-learning. All teams commented in their mid-term and end-of-semester feedback that their original project became unviable: they had to change to organizing online. The arguments against organizing online include that it lacks “strong-ties,” lacks “hierarchical structures and central authority,” and people may not be able to achieve systematic change when they do not get their hands “dirty” (Gladwell Reference Gladwell2010). However, the forced experimentation of having to organize online was transformative for my students and proved that any shortcomings could be overcome.
Seizing new opportunities in the face of crisis, students were asked to revise their plans from three perspectives: reenergizing emotional capacity, re-strategizing, and adjusting implementations with new skill sets. I called this the “three-H approach” because the pedagogical intervention tackled the heart, head, and hands.
The “heart” intervention involved the reconstruction of shared experiences and urgency. Each leadership team was asked to incorporate the challenges caused by COVID-19 into its “story of us”—a story that captured the common challenges the team faced, shared choices, and outcomes it achieved together that empowered team members to overcome new challenges. The process of reconstructing the “story of us” also internalized the COVID-19–related challenges such that these problems were no longer action inhibitors but became instead action motivators. COVID-19 also changed the priorities of students and their leadership teams, resulting in previously nonurgent issues becoming urgent. Students were asked to rethink their “story of now” to bring urgency to the problems on which they intended to work, especially those that were COVID-19–related so that they experienced the emotional capacity needed for their project.
The “head” intervention encompassed the re-strategizing of their theories of change. This intervention asked students to use new resources (whether physical or virtual, emotional, or material) and to turn them into additional power so that they could achieve the change they wanted. COVID-19 pushed students to reorient their attention to the virtual world and to maximize the utilities they could obtain by using relevant resources.
The “hands” intervention equipped students with new skill sets and asked them to exercise those skills when implementing their project. This involved coaching their actions; guiding virtual relationship-building sessions so that trust and norms of reciprocity could be established within leadership teams and between the leadership team and their constituency; and having online team-building sessions.
All teams made significant adjustments to their project after these pedagogical interventions. One group, which previously planned to help a few local small businesses, completely abandoned their original project when they realized the more urgent problem was the lack of exercise and the subsequent health problems caused by quarantining. As they reconstructed their shared experiences, they realized that they were no longer exercising and were feeling worse as a result. Thus, by strategizing to use the Internet as a resource and tapping into individuals’ capacity to exercise at home, they decided to ask people to “walk with us,” post their steps online, and aim to take more steps together than the number of COVID-19 cases. They also used the new skill sets learned while implementing the project, including virtual coaching and relationship building. Within a few days, a community with solidarity was emerging, and participants had the sense of “beating COVID-19” as they took more steps than new cases. Within a week, their campaign reached participants in 16 countries and 23 US states, with about 2.4 million total steps taken. Core team members commented at the end of the semester that they would never have pursued this project had there not been COVID-19, and they felt encouraged and empowered.
The forced experimentation triggered by COVID-19 made students realize that online organizing also could be successful. Instead of thinking locally and acting in typical ways, students found that the disruptions made them absorb the principles of civic engagement and successfully apply them under new conditions (Brandzell Reference Brandzell2010).
Instead of thinking locally and acting in typical ways, students found that the disruptions made them absorb the principles of civic engagement and successfully apply them under new conditions.
It is important to point out that moving online did not devalue in-person organizing. All teams expressed that they planned to continue their project when we return to campus after COVID-19. The forced experimentation made them more willing to explore possibilities that they previously would not have considered or dared to try. Those experiences could strengthen the emancipatory post-pandemic pedagogy (Murphy Reference Murphy2020) and encourage students to combine virtual and physical organizing in their future civic-engagement endeavors.
The three-H intervention is replicable not only when we are faced with other types of disruptions because managing risks and uncertainties is now part of the built-in teachable moments. It also would work well for both fully offline and online courses as the mentality of “disruptions as opportunities” is internalized and normalized upfront. The students’ projects during COVID-19 undoubtedly will be good examples to inspire future students and their civic-engagement endeavors.
