On getting what you ask for
There's an interesting disconnect in Ivy A. Helman's essay in the CoHE (sorry, behind the paywall). Helman laments the outcome of her course on political activism, which required students to, among other things, actually do activist work. After assigning readings on activism and volunteerism, Helman sent the students off for their required ten hours of community activism, with lackluster results:
Yet sadly but unsurprisingly, upon reading their journals, I found that only one student had dedicated more than 10 hours to activism (she did 11.5); most students completed between 9 and 9.5 hours. I also had a number of students whose hours did not come close to meeting the requirement. One used six of the 10 hours for drive time. (She knew that I would only allow two — a concession to the fact that our college is in a remote town at least 40 minutes away from any major activist opportunities — but she apparently thought that if she chose somewhere even farther away, I would make an exception for her.) Three students started their own activist organization, then spent an hour throwing a Frisbee in the park and an hour celebrating their accomplishments. Another taught Sunday school (not activism) at a Buddhist temple and handed in a detailed description of the temple instead of an activist's journal.
The most striking thing about these results is not the (hardly unsurprising) "general apathy among the students, manifested in their procrastination and lack of interest," but that they are exactly what Helman designed the course to generate. That is, the course structure that Helman describes in her essay is thoroughly institutional in its layout: there are assigned readings with classroom discussion, a syllabus, writing assignments, a quantitatively-defined community activism project, and, one presumes, grades. While "an activist lobbies for change, educates and gains the support of the public on an issue, and then uses that support to make reforms," the course as described sounds entirely conventional; one might even call it conservative. The course content does not challenge its form. Nor does it challenge conventional structures of authority within the classroom. And, as far as I can tell, the course certainly doesn't ask the instructor to exit her "comfort zones," either pedagogically or politically. It doesn't seem at all surprising that the students proceeded to treat the course requirements as students frequently do--namely, as a series of external obstacles to be negotiated on the way to a final grade.
In fact, I was a trifle disturbed by Helman's self-representation here, since she constantly positions herself as the politically-enlightened figure trying to reach those bored students: "I spent most of the semester trying to convince my students of the importance of activism, and trying to motivate them to overcome their apathy, lack of interest, and attempts to stay in their comfort zones." While Helman casts the students as passive and disconnected, a state of mind that they bring to the course, she fails to ask herself why else the students might choose to resist the script she so clearly wants them to follow. Someone carting around a copy of Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life might have a few things to say about the Frisbee-playing students' "tactics."