For out teaching project, we decided the most effective way to share our knowledge and spark important conversations was through tabling in the commons. For two days we tabled in the Irvine Commons during lunch hours, laid out the brochures and documents, and offered free candy in order to attract people to our table. Together we created a brochure and coined it “The Real Face of Homelessness”. The brochure consisted of listing some of the major causes of homelessness, some statistics to emphasize the causes, and a few photos to offer a visual aspect of the data. In the brochure we included statistics about homelessness in the Redlands area and added a “What you can do to help!” section that promotes stereotype breaking, language awareness, the SOAN 324 course, and a link to local organizations individuals can volunteer their time at. Along with the brochure, we printed off the internship and volunteer list compiled on the class website for people to look at and take down numbers. In order to ground the issue in Redlands, we also printed off a document titled, “City of Redlands Indicators of Potential Homelessness”. The document offered an accurate portrayal about income distribution and housing affordability.

We chose the brochure and tabling approach because we wanted to be able to talk to people one on one and spark thought-provoking, casual conversation. Our hope was that through the brochure, students at the University of Redlands would gain a more educated opinion about causes of homelessness, what homeless people are really like, and the ways that homeless stereotypes continuously get reinforced and strengthened. Here at the University we are often shielded from the ugly truths that lay beyond the confines of the campus and it’s imperative that students are aware of the issues that plague Redlands and beyond.

Overall, our teaching effort was successful. We all worked very hard on trying to draw people to our table and spark important questions and thoughts. The most difficult thing with tabling is that even though people walk by consistently, they rarely every pay attention to the people that are in fact tabling. It was amazing how easily people can ignore the individuals lined up around the front of the commons and remain oblivious to the posters and documents spread out on the tables. Due to the amount of people that ignored us for the first twenty minutes on the first day of tabling, AJ had a great idea to buy candy in order to entice people to our table. The free candy did help draw attention, but we also realized that the statements we said to people had to be phrased in very particular ways in order for people to actually come up and talk to us. In the beginning when people passed by we would state something along the lines of, “Come learn about the real causes of homelessness and what you can do to help”. With this line, people quickly walked by. We then completely changed our approach to just yelling out, “Free Candy!” It was amazing to see how responsive people were when it wasn’t laden with information about hunger or homelessness. Once they got to the table to get free candy and realized what we wanted to talk about, most people made up excuses about being late for class or needing to run to get to work.

We also realized that it was easier to appeal to the Greek Community. Since we had print outs of all of the volunteer and internship opportunity list, we were able to pass them out to people in Greek life and ask them to pass it along to their community service chairs (since individuals involved in Greek life need to volunteer for at least ten hours a semester). An interesting experience we had was when we asked someone to take a brochure and they responded by saying, “I actually won’t read it.” It made us wonder, is it better for people to be honest and show their obvious disinterest or to be extremely receptive yet throw the brochure out as soon as they walk away from the table?