Reorientation Teaching Guide: Season 3 Episode 1
Learning Objectives
Students will understand some of the key conditions that make people protest.
Students will understand the complications of defining protests, what makes them successful or unsuccessful, and when they become “political.”
Podcast Questions
Why do college students protest, and why is there a popularized belief that campuses are sites of protest?
What does it mean to be a protest school? How do ideas of what constitutes a protest school change over time?
How does a protest about bus lanes become a microcosm for student protests at UW?
Kacie Luchchni Butcher mentions:
“it’s an example of students seeing a problem, getting organized and protesting to change it. … Now, in this case it wasn’t super successful. Even though the protest got all this attention, and even though university leaders were also asking the city to move the bus lane. The city dug in its heels. That bus lane stayed there until 1985.”
Would you still label the protest as unsuccessful despite all the action by students and the university?
Why do you think there’s so much emphasis on student protests in the 1960s? Why is it important to contextualize them as part of much larger protests?
Recommended Primary Sources
Recommended Secondary Sources
Adrian Daub, “How the Idea of the “College Campus” Captured American Imaginations—And Politics.” Time Magazine: Made by History, January 19th, 2025.