About the Course
We are in a period of tremendous social challenges.
Climate change, socioeconomic and racial disparities, and technology and AI are reshaping how we live.
Democracy is increasingly precarious, and political and ideological divides feel deeply entrenched. Many students today feel a generalized threat to community well-being.
A majority of Americans believe it is unlikely that younger people today will have a better life than their parents. Students care deeply about these social problems but often lack knowledge of how to take action as a force for change. Many social science courses, particularly in sociology, where teaching focuses on the many problems of society, leave students hopeless and without a concrete path for bringing about a better future in their communities.
Acting as a force for good represents Notre Dame’s core institutional mission and our university’s Catholic character.
The undergraduate student culture demonstrates an undeniable desire to improve the common good.
OUR STUDENTS WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
More than 80% of Notre Dame students participate in service or service learning, and about 7% of each graduating class spends a year or more in service.
But for our students to be part of a transformative force for good in society, they need empowerment to join existing service opportunities and answer complicated questions.
To deliver on Notre Dame’s commitment to being a force for good, we need to prompt our students to define the collective good, craft visions for change, and use a toolkit for transforming their positive impulses into practical action grounded in evidence-based social science.
Why Take This Course?
We are offering a class on The Good Society, which will turn students into catalysts for change and agents for human flourishing. Our class is distinctive in its embrace of positive social science, which focuses on successful cases of progress as the basis for learning about how to bring about the common good. By the end of class, our students will learn how to leverage existing scholarship, identifying and assessing evidence from successful cases to guide change in other contexts.
In the face of real, persistent complex social problems, sometimes called “wicked problems,” our class adopts a small-wins approach. Scoping problems to a level that undergraduate students can meaningfully engage with, in which they can develop some real group expertise, we enable them to make tangible incremental changes. Such small wins motivate persistence, and bending the arc of history towards the good society is going to take persistence.
Course Structure
We start by giving students space to reflect on their values and visions for a good society…and teach them the social science skills of observation and interviewing to gather data about how other people envision a good society. Despite our class title, we want students to recognize that there is not one good society. People have different ideas about what flourishing means…and students need to confront this reality—-and learn to work within it––to affect real meaningful change in a pluralistic world. We aim to cultivate curiosity and humility in our students.
In the second phase of class, students will work in groups to develop subject area expertise related to their passion. Because we want to tap into their intrinsic motivations, we intentionally make space for student-led discernment about the issues that call to them—-we do not impose a topical focus. We offer a method for envisioning-and incrementally achieving—-the social good that can be applied to various social problems. Here, students will learn to employ comparative logic to identify novel pathways to human flourishing.
Throughout the course, our approach puts students in the driver’s seat with in-class simulations that help them actively understand different social issues. We challenge students to practice real world “hacks,” during which they must think like problem solvers about social challenges. Our class assignments deepen this learning as students draft policy briefs pitched at institutional decision-makers and learn how to propose interventions with impact.
By the end of class, we aim for students to experience a small win within the course because that makes it more likely that they will continue to pursue small wins through social transformation efforts long after graduation.
