Community Learning
Cultural Mapping For Social Change
K45.1422 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Jaime Martinez
Where do forces of gentrification intersect with grassroots efforts to preserve the cultural identity of a marginalized community? This course explores how to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a powerful application in mapping technology, as a tool for cultural documentation, community engagement, and public policy analysis. We will analyze how changing demographics and market forces are redefining the cultural landscape and boundaries of ethnic communities in New York. We will explore the effectiveness of GIS as a mapping tool to help reclaim cultural identity, uncover historical patterns of segregation and displacement, and empower community members to become informed citizens in the decision-making process. Specific skills we’ll learn include how to geocode addresses, do a spatial analysis, and use census data to map the racial and income composition of New York neighborhoods.
Gentrification and Its Discontents
K45.1453 4 CR M 9:30-12:15 René Francisco Poitevin
This course focuses on the process of community restructuring known as “gentrification” – the displacement of poor residents and local stores by an influx of affluent and middle class people and businesses. Beginning with a case study of the Lower East Side (site of one of the most intense community battles against gentrification of the last thirty years), we’ll look at the theoretical and political debates around urban renewal, community development and neighborhood displacement. We’ll conclude, in collaboration with low income housing advocacy groups, with a closer look at some of the ongoing struggles and campaigns going on in New York City around affordable housing. Readings include Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier, Jane Abu-Lughod’s From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, and Christopher Merle’s Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate and Resistance in New York City.
Literacy in Action
K45.1460 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Maura Donnelly
This course combines volunteer work in New York City adult literacy and English as a second language programs with an academic introduction to the philosophy, history, and current issues of basic education. Students will work as volunteer teachers of reading and writing oral English or mentors at such institutions as the University Settlement, Union Settlement, International Rescue Committee, and Fortune Society. In class they will read about and discuss such key issues as which “basic skills” U.S. adults now need, which adults lack these skills and why, the implications for our economy, families, communities, and democracy, the instructional approaches developed for adults, and the steps that might be taken to build support for high-quality, adult basic-skills programs. Throughout the course, students will relate such issues to their own on-site experiences in class discussion and role-playing, and create a portfolio of writing that includes on-site observations, lesson plans, reflections, and a final analytical paper. Readings may include Making Meaning, Making Change (Auerbach); We Make the Road by Walking (Horton and Freire); and the journals, Focus on Basics and The Change Agent.
Organizing and Unions in New York City
K45.1465 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 David Paskin
This course is intended to provide students with little prior background in organizing with an understanding of how unions work. This class is not a “union organizing” course per se. Using the “contingent or nonstandard” sector as our main focus, students will have to go out into the community and select an occupation to analyze in order to look at the specific issues these workers face; how to develop possible strategies for organizing; and possible long term plans of action. Regular weekly reading assignments will be discussed and each student’s written research will be central to the class discussions.
Policy, Community and Self
K45.1466 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Eric Brettschneider
Intended to introduce policy, this course will include an internship at a policy and /or advocacy organization. Community building, service integration and child welfare will be featured in readings, discussion, and internships. Through examples such as ethnic matching placements in foster care, zero tolerance approaches to drug abuse, or public financing of political campaigns, students will come to understand how government, schools, gangs, religious institutions and families can, with varying degrees of explicitness and formality, all make policy. Students will at the course conclusion be able to: identify policies within their lives; argue all sides of a policy question; appreciate the importance of evidence; and distinguish implementation from formulation. Readings will include Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, and The Lost Children of Wilder, by Nina Bernstein. Students will be helped to connect meetings they attend and the policy concepts taught and discussed in class. The goal is to leave no student unaware of the importance of policy in their own and their community’s life. The course will focus on policies that are empowering. Assignments will include an internship journal.
Popular Education and Community Organizing
K45.1467 4CR R 6:20-9:00 Esperanza Martell
The purpose of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the field of popular education and community organizing. Using the urban environment as our laboratory and working in collaboration with community groups, we will examine how organizers and organizations apply popular education for mass mobilization, social action, grass roots empowerment, leadership development and advocacy, as well as newer community building approaches. Special attention will be paid to issues of gender, class, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation in organizing. Students are required to volunteer for a minimum five hours per week during this semester with a community organization.
Political Journalism and Activism
K45.1476 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Kathy Engel
How is important public information communicated? What gets filtered and how? How do these questions shape public opinion and action? What is censorship and how is it addressed? What is the difference between publicizing an event, working to make public space for alternative perspectives on pressing issues, and holding the media accountable? How do civic and advocacy organizations work to develop relationships with the media to consistently and responsibly get their information onto the airwaves, pages of newspapers and through the ever expanding electronic world of web/internet? How do people get alternative sources of information? What is the relationship of documentary film/video with other forms of media and advocacy efforts? These are some of the questions that we will address in this course. We will look at the work of media watchdog groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the work of independent journalists like Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) and Laura Flanders (Air America), and those columnists, reporters and producers pushing the mainstream media to include different perspectives and information such as NY Times columnist Bob Herbert, and PBS/NPR host Maria Hinojosa. We’ll discuss ethnic press and questions of audience, accessibility and assumptions in organizational communication as well as media focus.