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Creating Social Change

Activity: Know Your Positionality and Develop Critical Awareness

Learning Goal: To help learners know who they are as changemakers and how to understand where change is needed. To help them develop self-awareness, agency, and empathy.

Designing social change means making the kind of change that will have a lasting impact on social practices. It’s about the type of change that moves people beyond surviving to thriving. To achieve this, you need to know who you are and what motivates you as a changemaker, you need an awareness of the forces preventing you (and others) from thriving, and you need to make a conscious effort to “design out” these forces on individual and collective levels. Declaring your positionality is a good way to get started. It’s a reflective practice of thinking about who you are: your identities, your social position, and how these affect your work.

This activity challenges you to develop a positionality statement and fine tune your critical awareness.

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Exam Copies for Educators

To request a complimentary examination copy to review for use in your classroom, contact Penguin Random House Education for PreK–12 Education or for Higher Education.