I'm delighted with the outcome of our pilot course on material-culture-studies-through-assemblage-art. Julie was a grand teaching partner, and I do think the course benefits greatly from the behind-the-scenes wranglings of a Humanities person and a social scientist. So we've decided to do it again as soon as our departments can permit it, and to see if we might shape it into something that would meet at least one Gen Ed requirement (maybe two).
The Shirk research could qualify as service-learning but only for students doing many weeks of it and I'm not sure Julie would want to devote so much time to the dimensions of subculture formation influenced by Shirk. That said, it could be plausible because, as I've mentioned before, Shirk's influential involvement/oversight of urban renewal and the Pei Plan was key to much of what happened to the downtown area and its communities.
A study of the Pei Plan and MAPS (our city's two main urban renewal endeavors) and its consequences for community life could be a rich, 6-hour course for us. I'm thinking Spring 2010. I could teach the Shirk research/Pei Plan stuff as a service-learning Comp II and if we weren't able to link both sections I could do it as a standalone Honors Comp II with the team-taught course being an option (perhaps for Arts & Human Values or multicultural studies credit) but for the Comp II people. Julie could maybe use her Intro to Sociology class as a link also.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
