About the UTSFL Pro-Life Classroom Project

The vision of the Pro-Life Classroom Project is to have well-informed, well-formed, well-educated campus club members who are well-trained in the apologetics of the mind and heart, and who are tested and ready to engage their peers and the public in a dialogue about life issues.

1. To form and educate pro-life club members on campus
2. To provide a regular environment to learn about life issues, practice apologetics, discuss questions and challenges
3. To give leaders a chance to learn how to educate their peers

To use a seminar curriculum to structure pre-existing pro-life resources in a format that can be easily used by a variety of campus groups in regular meetings. Some key considerations:

• Short, frequent, consistent sessions (Suggested: 1-2h weekly)
• Mix of presentation/dialogue
• Activate and develop student leaders by giving them an opportunity to educate their peers
• Develop a curriculum that can be used by any club, implemented easily (like NCLN club manual)

This seminar curriculum is designed be used by pro-life clubs on campus to educate and form their members. It is designed to be:

• spiral: gradually progressing from basic to advanced material in a spiral (rather than linear) fashion, so students can continually revisit the same topics but at greater depth each time. There are several reasons for this approach:
  • To allow newcomers to join at any point, or students to continue even if they miss some seminars (much more difficult with a linear programme) [hop on / hop off]
  • To allow the classroom to be informed by field experience (new questions on familiar topics are often raised through experience in the field
  • Reinforcement: revisiting the same topics in greater depth is a good way to promote deep learning through reinforcement
• modular: seminar topics are broken into flexible half or full hour modules for several reasons:
  • To accommodate different schedules, e.g. modules can be combined to support bi-weekly half hour meetings or weekly two hour meetings
  • To allow room for role-playing: a half hour module can be taken into a full hour meeting, with more time left over for questions and role-playing
  • To allow breadth- or depth-first approaches: while breadth-first is generally recommended within streams (e.g. PBA 100-level, then PBA 200-level, then PBA 300-level, etc.), a depth-first approach could be useful when there is a time sensitive need to educate club members about a specific issue (e.g. focusing on dialogue and graphic images in preparation for GAP, or on Canadian Law and incrementalism in preparing for activism to support a new legislative effort)
  • To allow for the inclusion of advanced topics: these advances topics are too specialized for inclusion in a seminar program every year, but having them in the curriculum can make members aware of what advanced topics there are so that they might pick a few to focus on
• built on existing lessons: there are already great resources and materials and lessons available for presenting this material. This curriculum encourages the use of that pre-existing material as much as possible. What this aims to provide, which is missing, is a structure for campus club seminars. For example, the CCBR's Pro-Life Classroom is somewhat modular, but it's quite linear (with some advanced topics as side branches). This works well for self-study, but is ill-suited for campus club group study where students might hop on at any point or want to revisit earlier topics in more depth. The curriculum provides a new structure for delivering the same lessons/content.
• systematic: the seminar codes (explained below) group topics within units, streams, substreams and related topics, in order to aid in planning particular areas of focus

See seminars.

Example: PBA100H

• First two letters signify the unit
  • PB for pre-born human rights
  • EL for end-of-life issues
• Third letter signifies the stream
  • Apologetics
  • Politics
  • Heart apologetics
  • Strategy
• The first digit signifies the level
  • 100: introductory
  • 200: intermediate (for activism, dialogue)
  • 300: topics in…
  • 400: advanced topics
• The second digit is often used to group similar topics, e.g.
  • Aplogetics
    • PBAx0x: second premise objections
      • PBAx01-x04: science
      • PBAx05-x09: personhood
    • PBAx1x: first premise objections
    • PBAx2x: Dialogue substream
  • Politics
    • PBPx0x: Current law and History
    • PBPx1x: Political Activism
      • PBPx11-x14: Federal
      • PBPx15-x19: Provincial
    • PBPx2x: Public Policy Issues
  • PBxx8x: Independent Study Projects, e.g. books to read
  • PBxx90: field trips / activism
• The last letter refers to suggested length
  • H means half hour (20-30 min.)
  • Y means full hour (45-60 min.)

• Each session should include:
  • Brief presentation (50-75%)
  • When relevant, role-playing or breakout session (25%)
  • Time for questions (25%)
• Variety of presenters:
  • Primary, strong exec member(s) who commit to implementing curriculum for the year and oversee the program (e.g. Education Coordinator / Professor)
    • Make it work
  • Secondary, invite other student leaders to lead seminars on topics of interest
    • Activate leaders, give them an opportunity to engage more deeply with material by teaching it to others
  • Special Occassions: Guest speakers, to provide longer presentations to the club on areas of expertise