MAPPING CAMPUS
Your questions about peers, groups, allies, and issues is the first step in helping students think about the process of “mapping” their campus. The work they are doing to promote civic engagement will be greatly facilitated by the extent that they understand the campus in all of its complexity. A discussion of mapping and the questions and issues involved with different levels of mapping can be found at www.actionforchange.org/getstarted/.
Your role in this mapping process is critical. In this process, you can;
• Be an institutional guide, you can share your knowledge of administrative structures, important players, existing civic offerings, etc.
• Coach them in developing an understanding of the subtleties that underlie the more visible parts of their campus map. It is easy to show students a diagram of the administrative organization of the institution. It is much more difficult to help them see that different people make different decisions on campus. If they want to move a specific agenda forward on campus, there are ways of doing that which are more likely to succeed and ones that may be doomed to failure.
• Help them think about what they might do with the information they put together as part of the mapping process with thoughts ranging from PR possibilities to meeting with the President, or drafting a policy recommendation.
