Glancing back to my university students years, I realized that I was not politically conscious not even remotely, I even doubt that it was imbedded in my subconscious mind. It was totally absent, my routine would involve going to class, a lot of reading and studying, swimming and tennis with jaymie and amie (my bff) or hanging around my hubby. The clubs I joined were known as zouk , aloha and modestos ( just to name a few- LOL-). In a nutshell I partied as hard as I studied.
I was never caught up with campus election, honestly to this day I do not understand how it works, I don’t even know yet care or even bothered to be elucidated by the pro aspirasi or pro mahasiswa shenanigans. I didn’t even vote for the first two years I was in uni. After my second year it was made compulsory to vote or we risked being fined, I survived this ordeal by voting for the cutest guy and the most fashionable girl.
My political consciousness started to emerge only after BN sweeping lost in the recent 2008 elections. Looking back now , I kinda regretted not being politically conscious, especially looking at the situation now, and the controversy surrounding it. Adam Adli a student that was fighting for the removal of university and college act together with his comrades had become a hero for some and an object of contempt for some, merely for because of flags. Before I embark upon this treacherous threshold, I would like to reinstate my point I am not a fan f DSAI, personally I am the last person that wants him as PM. Secondly when comes to politician I lived by this analogy… the are all Casanovas they would say anything to get into your pants… it is the vocation of academician to give an objective facade of the situation to the public.
coming back to the issue of auku, I am arguing that students are agents of social change, The phrase was first used in 1965 at the annual conference of Canadian University Press in Calgary, when a delegation led by the McGill Daily proposed and passed an amendment to CUP's statement of principles that said "one of the major roles of the student press is to act as an agent of social change." The motion's authors argued that university students, including student journalists, had a special role to play in the social and civil-rights revolutions of the time, and objective reporting could not achieve this. Instead, student journalists had to take sides on social issues, and guide campus opinion accordingly.
As educators, it is our responsibility to develop students with knowledge and skills that provide mechanisms to effectively integrate academic disciplines with an understanding of self in relation to others on campus, in the community, and across the globe. Intentional integration of student development theories, such as leadership identity development, in the classroom can effectively facilitate deeper understanding of how students are personally connected to greater social issues. Students develop as socially conscious leaders capable of creating sustainable social change. In other words, student development theory offers academic disciplines—specifically public administration, a framework in which to guide faculty and students through the process of developing oneself as an agent of change.
Within the individual category, the values of consciousness of self, congruence, and commitment are included. This is the point at which students learn and become aware of their own values. Metaphorically, during this process, students understand the lens through which they see the world. Personality and self-awareness,are acknowledged and discovered in this category. There are many aspects of individual identity; it is multidimensional , and perhaps most important, it involves acquiring a greater understanding of self through the context of one’s environment, race, sexual orientation, and gender (just to name a few). In other words, self-awareness, once acknowledged and discovered, means that students have a greater capacitywith which to make meaning of and connection to their lived experiences.
The intellectual and practical motif which most readily captures both the values and alternative practices exemplified in the Students as agent of change initiative is that of mutuality, of education as both a shared responsibility and a shared achievement predicated on the dispositions and demanding realities of dialogic encounter. What is both exciting and daunting about Students as agent of change is the way in which it both clarifies issues that are central to the development of a dialogic learning community (whether it be a school or some other kind of human practice) and the way it insists on a response to fundamental questions those issues throw up. The issues to which I am referring are at the heart, not only of what it means to be a citizen, but also of what it means to be and become a person. They have to do with both the intellectual and practical challenge of articulating what an inclusive educational community might look and feel like.
Central to such a project are issues to do with power and authority, freedom and equality, and, as important and necessary as each of these, the dispositions and values of democratic living without which democracy itself becomes a mere mechanism that more often than we would wish turns out to betray the very aspirations that inspire its inception. Students as agents of change is potentially as creative and important as it is demanding, if only because it has within it the possibility of helping us to make a practical and theoretical leap of grounded imagination that takes seriously Raoul Vaneigem’s insistence that ‘A minute correction to the essential is more important than a hundred new accessories’.
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