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Most social challenges fall outside of the authority of any single individual and therefore require collective action—coordinated efforts by many stakeholders to implement solutions. Despite growing interest in teaching students to lead collective action, we lack models for how to teach these skills. Collective action ostensibly involves design: the act of planning to change existing situations into preferred ones. In other domains, instructors commonly scaffold design using an instructional model known as studio critique in which students strengthen their plans by exchanging arguments with peers and instructors. This study explores whether studio critique can serve as the basis for an effective instructional model in collective action. Using design-based research methods, we designed and implemented scoping deliberations, a new instructional model that augments studio critique with domain-specific templates for planning collective action and repeats weekly to enable iterations. We used process tracing to analyze data from field notes, video, and artifacts to evaluate causal explanations for events observed in this case study. By implementing scoping deliberations in a 10-week undergraduate course, we found that this model appeared effective at scaffolding engagement in planning collective action: students articulated and refined their plans by engaging in argumentation and iteration, as expected. However, students struggled to contact the community stakeholders with whom they planned to work. As a result, their plans rested on implausible, untested assertions. These findings advance instructional science by showing that collective action may require new instructional models that help students to test their assertions against feedback from community stakeholders. Practically, scoping deliberations appear most useful for scaffolding thoughtful planning in conditions when students are already collaborating with stakeholders. 

This commentary focuses on two important contrasts in the behavioral sciences: (i) default versus nondefault study populations, where default samples have been used disproportionately (for psychology, the default is undergraduates at major research universities), and (ii) the adoption of a distant versus close (engaged) attitude toward study samples. Previous research has shown a strong correlation between these contrasts, where default samples and distant perspectives are the norm. Distancing is sometimes seen as necessary for objectivity, and an engaged orientation is sometimes criticized as biased, advocacy research, especially if the researcher shares a social group membership with the study population (e.g., a black male researcher studying black male students). The lack of diversity in study samples has been paralleled by a lack of diversity in the researchers themselves. The salience of default samples and distancing in prior research creates potential (and presumed) risk factors for engaged research with nondefault samples. However, a distant perspective poses risks as well, and particularly so for research with nondefault populations. We suggest that engaged research can usefully encourage attention to the study context and taking the perspective of study samples, both of which are good research practices. More broadly, we argue that social and educational sciences need skepticism, interestedness, and engagement, not distancing. Fostering an engaged perspective in research may also foster a more diverse population of social scientists.