Strengthening Communities through Social Innovation

CHCH101 offers anyone interested in active citizenship, community engagement, and social innovation with the opportunity to combine academic content with volunteering and critical reflection. Through this innovative design and delivery, this course serves as a cornerstone experience for further study in these topics across a wide range of disciplines.

15 points

Media and Society

COMS101 explores the relationship between society and media - including social media, print, broadcasting, and all kinds of online spaces. It asks how our understandings of the world and people around us are mediated, how media have shaped society, and how society is reflected and produced through media. We will explore topics like media audiences, technologies, ownership and work; the frames of representation, power, and identity; and analytical tools like semiotics, discourse, and narrative. COMS101 is a stage one course that does not require any prior media study, but it builds on everything you have ever watched, listened to, interacted with, and produced. This course has on-campus and distance options. It includes weekly written exercises and requires active in-class engagement on campus, or in the distance stream to develop core university skills and learn effectively from the teaching staff and from each other.

15 points

Introduction to Youth Leadership: Leading the Self

What is the role of 'the self' in youth and community leadership? What are the personal dispositions required for youth and community leadership and how might these be nurtured within, for and by the self, and/or by others? In this course, students will explore self-leadership from contemporary psychological, philosophical, cultural, and/or any other theoretical perspective/s relevant to their situation and to contemporary Aotearoa. Kaupapa Maori approaches will be explored, as part of which students will be required to have experienced a stay on the noho marae (or alternative ).

15 points

Social Leadership: Leading with Others

Social leadership - leading with others - explores the dynamics of collaboration and social change and their implications for leadership. Theories of group leadership, problem-solving styles and the potential of different types of leadership will be analysed and critiqued. In this course, students will reflect on and trace their participation as members of various communities: whanau, community, iwi, professional, social and so on. The course draws on the taonga of bicultural Aotearoa to consider the strengths of indigenous leadership and its resonance with and insights for community leadership globally

15 points

YACL101; or 30 points at 100 level in YACL, CHCH, EDUC, POLS, SOCI or HSRV; or permission of the Head of School.