Becoming Us: Creating Human Futures in a World Coming Apart at the Seams

EDU A245 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This is an optimistic course about a pessimistic state of affairs. There is no denying it – something feels fundamentally broken about our world. Across education, work, politics, technology, health, and community life, many of the systems that organize human society feel increasingly strained: inequality is widening, racism is persisting, institutions are losing trust, consumer capitalism rewards extraction over care, bureaucratic systems center the measurable over the meaningful, and technology, performativity, and polarization are reshaping public and private life. At a fundamental level, we seem to have lost track of what we value and what it means to be human together.

In Becoming Us, we seek to reinvigorate a long tradition of human beings working together to address their own problems. Drawing on community organizing, positive organizational theory, systems thinking, political economy, and moral philosophy, students will explore how change happens within and across human systems. The course emphasizes the relationship between small acts and large structures: how listening, coalition-building, trust, courage, imagination, and collective action can ripple outward to reshape organizations, institutions, and communities.

Students will learn how this way of working is relevant to leading schools, non-profits, and other organizations, as well as how it can enable us to work across organizations to solve large collective problems. Students will learn to analyze complexity, navigate power and conflict, build healthy relationships, organize across differences, and identify leverage points for meaningful change. We will learn how to nurture living systems and cultivate the conditions for change, offering alternatives to control and compliance.

Throughout the semester, students will undertake a “Make the World a Better Place” project in which they identify a real problem in a community or institution they care about and build a coalition to address it. The goal is not only to study change, but to practice it.

This course is for students who want to remain thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply human while confronting the challenges of an increasingly fractured world—and who believe that even in deeply dark times, new futures can still be built together.