Week One (Advocacy and You)Public Advocacy To begin, when we think about public advocacy, we are talking about the process of communicating withothers about social issues with the goal of improving our world. Advocacy is about persuading others to support a particular perspective or cause. During the course of this semester, you’ll be asked to engage in advocacy by preparing a persuasive presentation about a social issue that you care about. Five Components of Advocacy In order to help us understand how we can engage in public advocacy we are going to talk about five keycomponents of public advocacy. Reflexivity The first component is reflexivity. Paulo Freire introduced the notion of reflexivity in order to help us understand how we participate in social systems that may harm or help ourselves or others. For example, if we were on The Square in downtown Denton and a homeless person asked you for some change to spare and we decided not to make eye contact and walked right past them, what does that action say? Regardless of whether or not you believe we should give money to homeless individuals, by not responding at all and/or by avoiding eye contact, do we in some way reinforce the notion of what’s called dehumanization of homelessness? One of the interesting things about the research that’s been done by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty is that they found that homeless individuals are often treated as objects and that’s there’s actually a criminalization of the homelessness. Instead of reacting to individuals as people, we have a tendency, instead, to just see the problem. As this sign says “No Family”, ”No Support”, has “Health Problems”, could really use some compassion. Freire would challenge us to think about this reflexively and to think about what are the consequences of us not making eye contact. So at the end, reflexivity is about developing awareness of how our communication behaviors include others or in this case exclude others. And this reflexivity about the social systems and our own behaviors is the first step in engaging in advocacy. Critical Literacy The second component of public advocacy is critical literacy. Critical literacy is a form of information literacy. It moves beyond the surface of the material provided to understand the motives and ideologies of the authors of a given text. We’ll spend some time thinking about how to analyze text, how to analyze sources and how to determine the credibility of those sources. We will also talk about social media and mass media and how to develop media and social media literacy. Dialogue: More than Just Speaking The third component is that of dialogue. Dialogue is focused on more than just speaking. It’s first about listening to one another and it’s listening not by hearing those words, but listening with compassion to understand differing viewpoints, and that’s what truly allows dialogue to occur. So by engaging incompassionate critical listening we’re able to engage in a dialogue with one another where we truly understand another individual’s perspective. Speaking up! The fourth approach or component of public advocacy is speaking up. This is simply being willing to stand up and advocate for a particular social issue when engaging in everyday communication with one another. Are you willing to stand up? Are you willing to be counted? The whole idea behind speaking up is a willingness to engage in the issues to begin with instead of simply ignoring them. Alliance Building The final component is Alliance Building. Alliance building is thinking about how you can engage with one another to make connections and build alliances. Alliances aren’t about agreeing with one another all the time. Instead it’s about working together to address social issues and problems in our communities and understanding how we can work together to resolve issues. Conclusion So the goal behind public advocacy isn’t for everyone to agree. Instead it’s for us to be reflexive, think about our role in the social process and our role in our communities, to engage in critical literacy with the materials that were provided and that we’re reading, to engage in dialogue, which includes listening to one another, to be willing to speak up and engage in these conversations, and build alliances with others, and not just individuals you agree with, individuals you also agree with who are trying to solve the same problem. Week Two (Perception and Identity)Perception Process To begin with, the perception process is concerned with how we make sense out of those experiences that we engage in. So it becomes this process of making sense out of those experiences. In order to engage in the perception process we go through three stages of perception. The first one is selecting what information to pay attention to. This is what we decide to tune into and what we decide to tune out. We are also concerned with then is how cognitively organize the information that we take in is. And then finally we assign meaning through interpretation. Selection So to begin with, what do tune into? We are bombarded all the time with messages. Whether its e-mail, all of the social media that we’re involved in, this gets us to a point where we really have to decide what stimuli are we going to pay attention to and what stimuli aren’t we going to pay attention to. So selectionis about determining where you are going to put your focus in that moment. So you’re going to sit at dinner with your friends and all be checking your messages that you’re putting on Facebook to one another or checking your e-mails or are you going to sit there and have a face-to-face conversation? It’s not that one is right or one is wrong, but it’s about what these expectations are in our relationship andhow we pay attention to certain messages and what messages we tend to ignore. In this age of convergence as the book talks about, what we decide to tune into and what we decide to tune out is an important part of the perception process. Cognitive Organization Once we decide what we pay attention to, we then move to the second stage of the process which is about organizing information cognitively. There are 4 key concepts here that we are going to discuss. Prototypes The first one is prototypes. Prototypes are representative examples of perceptual categories. SO what does that mean? Representative examples of perceptual categories. Well you can