Public Policy

The ACE component is offered in election years only.  As a means of learning about voting and the practices of citizenship, an academic civic engagement project provided four options for students to gain hands-on experience.  Options offered included: voter registration, election judge, political campaign work, and helping at a League of Women Voter’s forum.  In addition, Jeff Narabrook, Voter Outreach Director from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, visited the class to share about his work and to talk with students about their experiences this past fall.

The ACE component is offered in election years only.  As a means of learning about voting and the practices of citizenship, an academic civic engagement project provided four options for students to gain hands-on experience.  Options offered included: voter registration, election judge, political campaign work, and helping at a League of Women Voter’s forum.  In addition, Jeff Narabrook, Voter Outreach Director from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, visited the class to share about his work and to talk with students about their experiences this past fall.

The ACE component is offered in election years only.  As a means of learning about voting and the practices of citizenship, an academic civic engagement project provided four options for students to gain hands-on experience.  Options offered included: voter registration, election judge, political campaign work, and helping at a League of Women Voter’s forum.  In addition, Jeff Narabrook, Voter Outreach Director from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, visited the class to share about his work and to talk with students about their experiences this past fall.

St. Olaf College owns a distinctive collection of World War II propaganda posters from Occupied Europe.  For the academic civic engagement assignment, students will use the historical knowledge and research skills developed in this seminar, and work with experts in collections curation at St. Olaf and other institutions, to draft formal research reports on selected posters related to France during the war.  These reports will contribute directly to efforts by Flaten Art Museum and the Libraries’ Special Collections section to curate a College resource that will eventually be accessible to students, scholars, and the larger public.

For the ACE component of this class, students will run community exit polls at voting sites and present the results of the poll to the general public at a mini-conference. This will help the community gain new insights into voting and political participation in the community.

Students will be conducting semester-long research on candidate communication on congressional websites.  Students will present their findings to the general public through an elections mini-conference. This will inform members of the public about how candidates communicate, prominent issues in political debate, how issues are framed, how information is disseminated to the public, and how candidates deploy negativity and/or rhetorical attacks.

Part of a multi-year project, the civic engagement component of this course built upon past work by St. Olaf students regarding immigration issues.  The Rural Immigration Network project aims to create a useful and well-used online network of national scope, which will share practical information and cultural knowledge.  It seeks to reach rural communities diversifying through immigration across the United States.  Students in this course conducted research to translate social science findings pertinent to community leaders in rural communities into a standardized format suitable for sharing online.  These findings will help to identify innovative, positive responses to immigration in rural communities.  Students also participated in a hands-on workshop with immigration scholars and leaders from around the country to help shape the next steps for this project.

Students work in groups on substantial problems posed by, and of current interest to, area businesses and government agencies. The student groups decide on promising approaches to their problem and carry out the necessary investigations with minimal faculty involvement. Each group reports the results of its investigations with a paper and an hour-long presentation to the sponsoring organization.

Since its inception in 1916, the New Hampshire primary has attained a preeminent place in American presidential politics. This course will provide students with a broad overview of the presidential nominating process through a detailed examination of the New Hampshire primary. Students read academic analyses of the New Hampshire primary and intern with a presidential candidate. A prior version of this course is the subject of the following article from the Journal of Political Science Education: New Hampshire: The Effects of an Experiential Learning Course on Civic Engagement.